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MARTIN EDEN 


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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 


NEW YORK + BOSTON + CHICAGO 
ATLANTA * SAN FRANCISCO 


MACMILLAN & CO., LimirEeD 
LONDON + BOMBAY - CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 


THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lrtp, 
TORONTO 


MARTIN EDEN 


BY 


JACK LONDON 


AUTHOR OF “THE CALL OF THE WILD,” ETC., ETC. 


WITH FRONTISPIECE BY THE KINNEYS 


New Work 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1909 


Ali rights reserved 


Copyriext, 1908, 


By JACK LONDON. 





Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1909. 


Noriosod 3Ppress 
J. 8. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 


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wile cyt, ba wdidwumetund did nor = hee” 





“ Let me live out my years in heat of blood! 
_ Let me lie drunken with the dreamer’s wine! 
Let me not see this soul-house built of mud 
_ Go toppling to the dust a vacant shrine! ” 





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MARTIN EDEN 


CHAPTER I 


THE one opened the door with a latch-key and went in, 
followed by a young fellow who awkwardly removed his 
cap. He wore rough clothes that smacked of the sea, and 
he was manifestly out of place in the spacious hall in 
which he found himself. He did not know what to do 
with his cap, and was stuffing it into his coat pocket 
when the other took it from him. The act was done 
quietly and naturally, and the awkward young fellow 
appreciated it. ‘He understands,’ was his thought. 
*¢ He'll see me through all right.” 

He walked at the other’s heels with a swing to his 
shoulders, and his legs spread unwittingly, as if the level 
floors were tilting up and sinking down to the heave and 
lunge of the sea. ‘The wide rooms seemed too narrow for 
his rolling gait, and to himself he was in terror lest his 
broad shoulders should collide with the doorways or 
sweep the bric-a-brac from the low mantel. He recoiled 
from side to side between the various objects and multi- 
plied the hazards that in reality lodged only in his mind. 
Between a grand piano and a centre-table piled high with 
books was space for a half a dozen to walk abreast, yet he 
essayed it with trepidation. His heavy arms hung loosely 
at his sides. He did not know what to do with those 
arms and hands, and when, to his excited vision, one arm 
seemed liable to brush against the books on the table, he 
lurched away like a frightened horse, barely missing the 
piano stool. He watched the easy walk of the other in 
front of him, and for the first time realized that his walk 

B 1 


2 MARTIN EDEN 


was different from that of other men. He experienced a 
momentary pang of shame that he should walk so un- 
couthly. The sweat burst through the skin of his fore- 
head in tiny beads, and he paused and mopped his bronzed 
face with his handkerchief. 

“Hold on, Arthur, my boy,” he said, attempting to 
mask his anxiety with facetious utterance. ‘This is too 
much all at once for yours truly. Give me a chance to 
get my nerve. You know I didn’t want to come, an’ I 
guess your fam’ly ain’t hankerin’ to see me neither.” 

“ That’s all right,” was the reassuring answer. “ You 
mustn’t be frightened at us. We’re just homely people — 
Hello, there’s a letter for me.”’ 

He stepped back to the table, tore open the envelope, 
and began to read, giving the stranger an opportunity 
to recover himself. And the stranger understood and 
appreciated. His was the gift of sympathy, understand- 
ing; and beneath his alarmed exterior that sympathetic 

_process went on. He mopped his forehead dry and 
glanced about him with a controlled face, though in the 
eyes there was an expression such as wild animals betray 
\.. when they fear the trap. He was surrounded by the 

“unknown, apprehensive of what might happen, ignorant 

of what he should do, aware that he walked and bore 
himself awkwardly, fearful that every attribute and power 
of him was similarly afflicted. He was keenly sensitive, 
hopelessly self-conscious, and the amused glance that the 
other stole privily at him over the top of the letter burned 
into him like a dagger-thrust. He saw the glance, but he 
gave no sign, for among the things he had learned was 
discipline. Also, that dagger-thrust went to his pride. 
He cursed himself for having come, and at the same time 
resolved that, happen what would, having come, he would 
carry it through. The lines of his face hardened, and 
into his eyes came a fighting light. He looked about 
more unconcernedly, sharply observant, every detail of the 
pretty interior registering itself on his brain. His eyes 
were wide apart; nothing in their field of vision escaped; 
and as they drank in the beauty before them the fighting 


MARTIN EDEN 3 


light died out and a warm glow took its place. He was 
responsive to beauty, and here was cause to respond. 

An oil painting caught and held him. A heavy surf 
thundered and burst over an outjutting rock; lowering 
storm-clouds covered the sky; and, outside the line of 
surf, a pilot-schooner, close-hauled, heeled over till every 
detail of her deck was visible, was surging along against 
a stormy sunset sky. There was beauty, and it drew him 
irresistibly. He forgot his awkward walk and came 
closer to the painting, very close. The beauty faded out 
of the canvas. His face expressed his bepuzzlement. He 
stared at what seemed a careless daub of paint, then 
stepped away. Immediately all the beauty flashed back 
into the canvas. ‘“ A trick picture,” was his thought, as 
he dismissed it, though in the midst of the multitudinous 
impressions he was receiving he found time to feel a prod 
of indignation that so much beauty should be sacrificed to 


- 


make a trick. He did not know painting. He had been wr 


brought up on chromos and lithographs that were always 
definite and sharp, near or far. He had seen oil paint- 
ings, it was true, in the show windows of shops, but the 
glass of the windows had prevented his eager eyes from 
approaching too near. 

He glanced around at his friend reading the letter and 
saw the books on the table. Into his eyes leaped a wist- 
fulness and a yearning as promptly as the yearning leaps 
into the eyes of a starving man at sight of food. An 
impulsive stride, with one lurch to right and left of the 
shoulders, brought him to the table, where he began 
affectionately handling the books. He glanced at the titles 
and the authors’ names, read fragments of text, caressing 
the volumes with his eyes and hands, and, once, recognized 


books and strange authors. He chanced upon a volume’ 
of Swinburne and began reading steadily, forgetful of 
where he was, his face glowing. ‘Twice he closed the 
book on his forefinger to look at the name of the author. 
Swinburne ! he would remember that name. That fellow 
had eyes, and he had certainly seen color and flash- 


er 


a book he had read. For the rest, they were strange py 


oe 
, ll 
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a E 


4 MARTIN EDEN 


ing light. But who was Swinburne? Was he dead a 
hundred years or so, like most of the poets? Or was he 
alive still, and writing? He turned to the title-page... 
yes, he had written other books ; well, he would go to the 
free library the first thing in the morning and try to get 
hold of some of Swinburne’s stuff. He went back to the 
text and lost himself. He did not notice that a young 
woman had entered the room. The first he knew was 
when he heard Arthur’s voice saying: — 

“ Ruth, this igs Mr. Eden.” 

The book was closed on his forefinger, and before he 
turned he was thrilling to the first new impression, which 
was not of the girl, but of her brother’s words. Under 


Abat muscled body of his he was a mass of quivering 
sensibilities. At the slightest impact of the outside world 


upon his consciousness, his thoughts, sympathies, and 
emotions leapt and played like lambent flame. He was 
extraordinarily receptive and responsive, while his imagi- 
nation, pitched high, was ever at work establishing re- 
lations of likeness and difference. ‘ Mr. Eden,” was 
what he had thrilled to— he who had been called “ Eden,” 
or “Martin Eden,” or just ‘“ Martin,” all his life. 
And “ Mister!” It was certainly going some, was his in- 
ternal comment. His mindseemed to turn, on the instant, 
into a vast camera obscura, and he saw arrayed around 
his consciousness endless pictures from his life, of stoke- 
holes and forecastles, camps and beaches, jails and boozing- 
kens, fever-hospitals and slum streets, wherein the thread 
of association was the fashion in which he had. been ad- 
dressed in those various situations. 

And then he turned and saw the girl. The phantas- 
magoria of his brain vanished at sight of her. She was | 
a pale, ethereal creature, with wide, spiritual blue eyes and 
a wealth of golden hair. He did not know how she was 
dressed, except that the dress was as wonderful as she. 
He likened her to a pale gold flower upon a slender stem. 
No, she was a spirit, a divinity, a goddess; such subli- 
mated beauty was not of the earth. Or perhaps the 
books were right, and there were many such as she in the 


MARTIN EDEN 5 


upper walks of life. She might well be sung by that chap 
Swinburne. Perhaps he had had somebody like her in 
mind when he painted that girl, Iseult, in the book there 
on the table. All this plethora of sight, and feeling, and 
thought occurred on the instant. There was no pause of 
the realities wherein he moved. He saw her hand com- 
ing out to his, and she looked him straight in the eyes as 
she shook hands, frankly, like a man. The women he 
had known did not shake hands that way. For that: 
matter, most of them did not shake hands at all. A flood 
of associations, visions of various ways he had made the 
acquaintance of women, rushed into his mind and threat- 
ened to swamp it. But he shook them aside and looked 
at her. Never had he seen sucha woman. The women 
he had known! Immediately, beside her, on either hand, 
ranged the women he had known. For an eternal second 
he stood in the midst of a portrait gallery, wherein she 
occupied the central place, while about her were limned 
many women, all to be weighed and measured by a fleet- 
ing glance, herself the unit of weight and measure. He 
saw the weak and sickly faces of the girls of the fac- 
tories, and the simpering, boisterous girls from the south 
of Market. There were women of the cattle camps, 
and swarthy cigarette-smoking women of Old Mexico. 
These, in turn, were crowded out by Japanese women, 
doll-like, stepping mincingly on wooden clogs; by Eura- 
sians, delicate featured, stamped with degeneracy; by 
full-bodied South-Sea-Island women, flower-crowned and 
brown-skinned. All these were blotted out by a gro- 
tesque and terrible nightmare brood —frowsy, shuffling 
creatures from the pavements of Whitechapel, gin-bloated 
-hags of the stews, and all the vast hell’s following of 
harpies, vile-mouthed and filthy, that under the guise of 
monstrous female form prey upon sailors, the scrapings 
of the ports, the scum and slime of the human pit. 

“Won't you sit down, Mr. Eden?” the girl was saying. 
“I have been looking forward to meeting you ever since 
Arthur told us. It was brave of you—” 

He waved his hand deprecatingly and muttered that it 


6 MARTIN EDEN 


was nothing at all, what he had done, and that any fellow 
would have done it. She noticed that the hand he waved 
was covered with fresh abrasions, in the process of healing, 
and a glance at the other loose-hanging hand showed it to 
be in the same condition. Also, with quick, critical eye, 
she noted a scar on his cheek, another that peeped out 
from under the hair of the forehead, and a third that ran 
down and disappeared under the starched collar. She 
repressed a smile at sight of the red line that marked the 
chafe of the collar against the bronzed neck. He was 
evidently unused to stiff collars. Likewise her feminine 
eye took in the clothes he wore, the cheap and unesthetic 
cut, the wrinkling of the coat across the shoulders, and 
the series of wrinkles in the sleeves that advertised bulg- 
ing biceps muscles. 

While he waved his hand and muttered that he had 
done nothing at all, he was obeying her behest by trying 
to get into a chair. He found time to admire the ease 
with which she sat down, then lurched toward a chair 
facing her, overwhelmed with consciousness of the awk- 
ward figure he was cutting. This was a new experience 
il him. All his life, up to then, he had been unaware 

” of being either graceful or awkward. Such thoughts of 
self had never entered his mind. He sat down gingerly 
on the edge of the chair, greatly worried by his hands. 
They were in the way wherever he put them. Arthur 
was leaving the room, and Martin Eden followed his exit 
with longing eyes. He felt lost, alone there in the room 
with that pale spirit of a woman. ‘There was no bar- 
keeper upon whom to call for drinks, no small boy to 
send around the corner for a can of beer and by means of 
that social fluid start the amenities of friendship flowing. 

“You have such a scar on your neck, Mr. Eden,” the 
girl was saying. “How did it happen? I am sure it 
must have been some adventure.” 

*¢ A Mexican with a knife, miss,” he answered, moisten- 
ing his parched lips and clearing his throat. “It was 
just a fight. After I got the knife away, he tried to bite 
off my nose.” 


MARTIN EDEN 7 


Baldly as he had stated it, in his eyes was a rich vision 
of that hot, starry night at Salina Cruz, the white strip 
of beach, the hghts of the sugar steamers in the harbor, 
the voices of the drunken sailors in the distance, the jos- 
tling stevedores, the flaming passion in the Mexican’s face, 
the glint of the beast-eyes in the starlight, the sting of the 
steel in his neck, and the rush of blood, the crowd and 
the cries, the two bodies, his and the Mexican’s, locked 
together, rolling over and over and tearing up the sand, 
and from away off somewhere the mellow tinkling of a 
guitar. Such was the picture, and he thrilled to the 
memory of it, wondering if the man could paint it who 
had painted the pilot-schooner on the wall. The white 
beach, the stars, and the lights of the sugar steamers 
would look great, he thought, and midway on the sand 
the dark group of figures that surrounded the fighters. 
The knife occupied a place in the picture, he decided, and 
would show well, with a sort of gleam, in the light of the 
stars. But of all this no hint had crept into his speech. 
‘“‘ He tried to bite off my nose,” he concluded. 

“ Oh,” the girl said, in a faint, far voice, and he noticed 
the shock in her sensitive face. 

He felt a shock himself, and a blush of embarrassment 
shone faintly on his sunburned cheeks, though to him it 
burned as hotly as when his cheeks had been exposed to 
the open furnace-door in the fire-room. Such sordid 
things as stabbing affrays were evidently not fit subjects 
for conversation with a lady. People in the books, in her 
walk of life, did not talk about such things — perhaps they 
did not know about them, either. 

There was a brief pause in the conversation they were 
trying to get started. Then she asked tentatively about 
the scar on his cheek. Even as she asked, he realized 
that she was making an effort to talk his talk, and he 
tesolved to get away from it and talk hers. 

“It was just an accident,” he said, putting his hand to 
his cheek. “One night, in a calm, with a heavy sea 
running, the main-boom-lift carried away, an’ next the 
tackle. The lift was wire, an’ it was threshin’ around 


8 MARTIN EDEN 


like a snake. The whole watch was tryin’ to grab it, an’ 
I rushed in an’ got swatted.” 
“ Oh,” she said, this time with an accent of comprehen- 
sion, though secretly his speech had been so much Greek 
to her and she was wondering what a lifé was and what 
swatted meant. 
“This man Swineburne,” he began, attempting to put 
his plan into execution and pronouncing the 2 long. 
“Who?” 
“Swineburne,” he repeated, with the same mispronun- 
ciation. ‘¢ The poet.” 
“ Swinburne,” she corrected. 
“Yes, that’s the chap,” he stammered, his cheeks hot 
again. ‘¢ How long since he died?” 
“Why, I haven’t heard that he was dead.” She looked 
at him curiously. “Where did you make his acquaint- 
ance 7” 
“JT never clapped eyes on him,” was the reply. “But I 
read some of his poetry out of that book there on the 
table just before you come in. How do you like his 
poetry?” 
. | And thereat she began to talk quickly and easily upon 

' the subject he had suggested. He felt better, and settled 
back slightly from the edge of the chair, holding tightly 
to its arms with his hands, as if it might get away from 
him and buck him to the floor. He had succeeded in 
making her talk her talk, and while she rattled on, he 
strove to follow her, marvelling at all the knowledge that 
was stowed away in that pretty head of hers, and drink- 
ing in the pale beauty of her face. Follow her he did, 
though bothered by unfamiliar words that fell glibly from 
her lips and by critical phrases and thought-processes 
that were foreign to his mind, but that nevertheless 
stimulated his mind and set it tingling. Here was in- 
tellectual life, he thought, and here was beauty, warm 
and wonderful as he had never dreamed it could be. He 
forgot himself and stared at her with hungry eyes. Here 
was something to live for, to win to, to fight for —ay, and 
die for. The books were true. There were such women 


MARTIN EDEN 9 


in the world. She was one of them. She lent wings to 
his imagination, and great, luminous canvases spread 
themselves before him, whereon loomed vague, gigantic 
figures of love and romance, and of heroic deeds for 
woman’s sake — for a pale woman, a flower of gold. And 
through the swaying, palpitant vision, as through a fairy 
mirage, he stared at the real woman, sitting there and 
talking of literature and art. He listened as well, but he 
stared, unconscious of the fixity of his gaze or of the fact 
that all that was essentially masculine in his nature was 
shining in his eyes. But she, who knew little of the world 
of men, being a woman, was keenly aware of his burning 
eyes. She had never had men look at her in such fashion, 
and it embarrassed her. She stumbled and halted in her 
utterance. The thread of argument slipped from her. 
He frightened her, and at the same time it was strangely 
pleasant to be so looked upon. Her training warned her 
of peril and of wrong, subtle, mysterious, luring; while 
her instincts rang clarion-voiced through her being, im- 
pelling her to hurdle caste and place and gain to this 
traveller from another world, to this uncouth young fellow 
with lacerated hands and a line of raw red caused by the 
unaccustomed linen at his throat, who, all too evidently, 
was soiled and tainted by ungracious existence. She was 
clean, and her cleanness revolted; but she was woman, 
and she was just beginning to learn the paradox of 
woman. 

“ As I was saying — what was I saying?” She broke 
off abruptly and laughed merrily at her predicament. — 

“ You was saying that this man Swinburne failed bein’ 
a great poet because—an’ that was as far as you got, 
miss,” he prompted, while to himself he seemed suddenly 
hungry, and delicious little thrills crawled up and down 
his spine at the sound of her laughter. Like silver, he 
thought to himself, like tinkling silver bells; and on the 
instant, and for an instant, he was transported to a far 
land, where under pink cherry blossoms, he smoked a cig- 
arette and listened to the bells of the peaked pagoda call- 
ing straw-sandalled devotees to worship. 


10 MARTIN EDEN 


“ Yes, thank you,” shesaid. “Swinburne fails, when all 
is said, because he is, well, indelicate. ‘There are many of 
his poems that should never be read. Every line of the 
really great poets is filled with beautiful truth, and calls 
to all that is high and noble in the human. Nota line of 
the great poets can be spared without impoverishing the 
world by that much.” 

“T thought it was great,” he said hesitatingly, ‘ the 
little I read. I had no idea he was such a— a scoundrel. 
I guess that crops out in his other books.” 

“There are many lines that could be spared from the 
book you were reading,” she said, her voice primly firm 
and dogmatic. 

‘“ T must ’a’ missed ’em,” he announced. ‘“ What I read 
was the real goods. It was all lighted up an’ shining, an’ 
it shun right into me an’ lighted me up inside, like the sun 
or a searchlight. That’s the way it landed on me, but I 
guess I ain’t up much on poetry, miss.” 

He broke off lamely. He was confused, painfully con- 
scious of his inarticulateness. He had felt the bigness and 
glow of life in what he had read, but his speech was inade- 
quate. He could not express what he felt, and to himself 
he likened himself to a sailor, in a strange ship, on a dark 
night, groping about in the unfamiliar running rigging. 
Well, he decided, it was up to him to get acquainted in 
this new world. He had never seen anything that he 
couldn’t get the hang of when he wanted to and it was 
about time for him to want to learn to talk the things that 
were inside of him so that she could understand. She 
was bulking large on his horizon. 

“ Now Longfellow —” she was saying. 

“Yes, ’ve read ’m,” he broke in impulsively, spurred 
on to exhibit and make the most of his little store of 
book knowledge, desirous of showing her that he was not 
wholly a stupid clod. ‘ ‘The Psalm of Life,’ ‘ Excelsior,’ 
an’ I guess that’s all.” 

She Inedded her head and smiled, and he felt, somehow, 
that her smile was tolerant, pitifully tolerant. He was 
a fool to attempt to make a pretence that way. That 


MARTIN EDEN 11 


Longfellow chap most likely had written countless books 
of poetry. 

“« Excuse me, miss, for buttin’ in that way. I guess the 
real facts is that I don’t know nothin’ much about such; 
things. It ain’t in my class. But I’m goin’ to make it in™ 
my class.”’ 

It sounded like a threat. His voice was determined, 
his eyes were flashing, the lines of his face had grown 
harsh. And to her it seemed that the angle of his jaw had 
changed; its pitch had become unpleasantly aggressive. 
At the same time a wave of intense virility seemed to surge 
out from him and impinge upon her. 

“JT think you could make it in—Zin your class,” she 
finished with a laugh. ‘“ You are very strong.” 

Her gaze rested for a moment on the muscular neck, 
heavy corded, almost bull-like, bronzed by the sun, spilling 
over with rugged health and strength. And though he sat 
there, blushing and humble, again she felt drawn to him. 
She was surprised by a wanton thought that rushed into 
her mind. It seemed to her that if she could lay her two 
hands upon that neck that all its strength and vigor would 
flow out to her. She was shocked by this thought. It 
seemed to reveal to her an undreamed depravity in her 
nature. Besides, strength to her was a gross and brutish 
thing. Her ideal of masculine beauty had always been 
slender gracefulness. Yet the thought still persisted. It 
bewildered her that she should desire to place her hands on 
that sunburned neck. In truth, she was far from robust, 
and the need of her body and mind was for strength. But 
she did not know it. She knew only that no man had 
ever affected her before as this one had, who shocked her 
from moment to moment with his awful grammar. 

“ Yes, I ain’t no invalid,” he said. ‘“* When it comes 
down to hard-pan, I can digest scrap-iron. But just now 
I’ve got dyspepsia. Most of what you was sayin’ I can’t 
digest. Never trained that way, you see. I like books 
and poetry, and what time I’ve had I’ve read’em, but I’ve 
never thought about ’em the way you have. ‘That’s why 
I can’t talk about ’em. I’m like a navigator adrift on a 


12 MARTIN EDEN 


strange sea without chart or compass. Now I want to get 
my bearin’s. Mebbe you can put me right. Howdid you 
learn all this you’ve ben talkin’ ?” 

“ By going to school, I fancy, and by studying,” she 
answered. 

“JT went to school when I was a kid,” he began to 
object. 

“Yes; but I mean high school, and lectures, and the 
university.” 

“ You’ve gone to the university?” he demanded in 
frank amazement. He felt that she had become remoter 
from him by at least a million miles. 

“I’m going there now. I’m taking special courses in 
English.” 

He did not know what “ English” meant, but he made 
a mental note of that item of ignorance and passed on. 

“ How long would I have to study before I could go to 
the university ?”’ he asked. 

She beamed encouragement upon his desire for knowl- 
edge, and said: “That depends upon how much studying 
you have already done. You have never attended high 
school? Of course not. But did you finish grammar 
school ?” 

‘“T had two years to run, when I left,” he answered. 
‘But [ was always honorably promoted at school.” 

The next moment, angry with himself for the boast, he 
had gripped the arms of the chair so savagely that every 
finger-end was stinging. At thesame moment he became 
aware that a woman was entering the room. He saw the 
girl leave her chair and trip swiftly across the floor to the 
newcomer. ‘They kissed each other, and, with arms 
around each other’s waists, they advanced toward him. 
That must be her mother, he thought. She was a tall, 
blond woman, slender, and stately, and beautiful. Her 
gown was what he might expect in such a house. His 
eyes delighted in the graceful lines of it. She and her 
dress together reminded him of women on the stage. 
Then he remembered seeing similar grand ladies and 
gowns entering the London theatres while he stood and 


MARTIN EDEN 13 


watched and the policemen shoved him back into the driz- 
zle beyond the awning. Next his mind leaped to the 
Grand Hotel at Yokohama, where, too, from the side- 
walk, he had seen grand ladies. ‘Then the city and the 
harbor of Yokohama, in a thousand pictures, began flash- 
ing before his eyes. But he swiftly dismissed the kaleido- 
scope of memory, oppressed by the urgent need of the 
present. He knew that he must stand up to be intro- 
duced, and he struggled painfully to his feet, where he 
stood with trousers bagging at the knees, his arms loose- 
hanging and ludicrous, his face set hard for the impend- 
ing ordeal. 


Po 


CHAPTER II 


THE process of getting into the dining room was a 
nightmare to him. Between halts and stumbles, jerks and 
lurches, locomotion had at times seemed impossible. But 
at last he had made it, and was seated alongside of Her. 


‘The array of knives and forks frightened him. They 


bristled with unknown perils, and he gazed at them, fas- 
cinated, till their dazzle became a background across 
which moved a succession of forecastle pictures, wherein 
he and his mates sat eating salt beef with sheath-knives 
and fingers, or scooping thick pea-soup out of pannikins 
by means of battered iron spoons. The stench of bad 
beef was in his nostrils, while in his ears, to the accom- 
paniment of creaking timbers and groaning bulkheads, 
echoed the loud mouth-noises of the eaters. He watched 
them eating, and decided that they ate like pigs. Well, 
he would be careful here. He would make nonoise. He 
would keep his mind upon it all the time. 

He glanced around the table. Opposite him was 
Arthur, and Arthur’s brother, Norman. They were her 
brothers, he reminded himself, and his heart warmed tow- 
ard them. How they loved each other, the members of 
this family! There flashed into his mind the picture of 
her mother, of the kiss of greeting, and of the pair of them 
walking toward him with arms entwined. Not in his 
world were such displays of affection between parents and 
children made. It was a revelation of the heights of 
existence that were attained in the world above. It was 
the finest thing yet that he had seen in this small glimpse 
of that world. He was moved deeply by appreciation of 
it, and his heart was melting with sympathetic tenderness. 


/ He had starved for love all his life. His nature craved 


love. It was an organic demand of his being. Yet he 
14 


MARTIN EDEN 15 


had gone without, and hardened himself in the process. 
He had not known that he needed love. Nor did he know 
it now. He merely saw it in operation, and. thrilled to it, 
and thought it fine, and high, and splendid. 

He was glad that Mr. Morse was not there. It was 
difficult enough getting acquainted with her, and her 
mother, and her brother, Norman. Arthur he already 
knew somewhat. The father would have been too much 
for him, he felt sure. It seemed to him that he had never 
worked so hard in his life. The severest toil was child’s 
play compared with this. Tiny nodules of moisture stood 
out on his forehead, and his shirt was wet with sweat from 
the exertion of doing so many unaccustomed things at 
once. He had to eat as he had never eaten before, to 
handle strange tools, to glance surreptitiously about and 
learn how to accomplish each new thing, to receive the 
flood of impressions that was pouring in upon him and 
being mentally annotated and classified; to be conscious 
of a yearning for her that perturbed him in the form of a 
dull, aching restlessness; to feel the prod of desire to win 
to the walk in life whereon she trod, and to have his 
mind ever and again straying off in speculation and vague 
plans of how to reach to her. Also, when his secret 
glance went across to Norman opposite him, or to any one 
else, to ascertain just what knife or fork was to be used 
in any particular occasion, that person’s features were 
seized upon by his mind, which automatically strove to 
appraise them and to divine what they were—all in 
relation to her. ‘Then he had to talk, to hear what was 
said to him and what was said back and forth, and to 
answer, when it was necessary, with a tongue prone to 
looseness of speech that required a constant curb. And 
to add confusion to confusion, there was the servant, an 
unceasing menace, that appeared noiselessly at his shoul- 
der, a dire Sphinx that propounded puzzles and co- 
nundrums demanding instantaneous solution. He was _ 
oppressed throughout the meal by the thought of finger- 
bowls. Irrelevantly, insistently, scores of times, he won- 
dered when they would come on and what they looked 


16 MARTIN EDEN 


like. He had heard of such things, and now, sooner or 
later, somewhere in the next few minutes, he would see 
them, sit at table with exalted beings who used them — 
ay, and he would use them himself. And most important 
of all, far down and yet always at the surface of his 
thought, was the problem of how he should comport him- 
self toward these persons. What should his attitude be ? 
He wrestled continually and anxiously with the problem. 
There were cowardly suggestions that he should make 
believe, assume a part; and there were still more cowardly 
suggestions that warned him he would fail in such course, 
“ that his nature was not fitted to live up to it, and that he 
would make a fool of himself. 

It was during the first part of the dinner, struggling to 
decide upon his attitude, that he was very quiet. He did 
not know that his quietness was giving the he to Arthur’s 
words of the day before, when that brother of hers had 
announced that he was going to bring a wild man home 
to dinner and for them not to be alarmed, because they 
would find him an interesting wild man. Martin Eden 
could not have found it in hin, just then, to believe that 
her brother could be guilty of such treachery — especially 
when he had been the means of getting this particular 
brother out of an unpleasant row. So he sat at table, per- 
turbed by his own unfitness and at the same time charmed 
by all that went on about him. For the first time he 
realized that eating was something more than a utilita- 
rian function. He was unaware of what he ate. It was 
merely food. He was feasting his love of beauty at this 
~ table where eating was an esthetic function. It was an 
intellectual function, too. His mind was stirred. He 
heard words spoken that were meaningless to him, and 
other words that he had seen only in books and that no 
man or woman he had known was of large enough mental 
caliber to pronounce. When he heard such words drop- 
ping carelessly from the lips of the members of this mar- 
vellous family, her family, he thrilled with delight. The 
romance, and beauty, and high vigor of the books were 
coming true. He was in that rare and blissful state 


MARTIN EDEN 17 


wherein a man sees his dreams stalk out from the cran- 
nies of fantasy and become fact. 

Never had he been at such an altitude of living, and 
he kept himself in the background, listening, observing, 
and pleasuring, replying in reticent monosyllables, saying 
“ Yes, miss,” and ‘“ No, miss,” to her, and “ Yes, ma’am,” 
and ‘“ No, ma’am,” to her mother. He curbed the impulse, 
arising out of his sea-training, to say “ Yes, sir,” and ‘“ No, 
sir,” to her brothers. He felt that it would be inappro- 
priate and a confession of inferiority on his part — which 
would never do if he was to win to her. Also, it was a dic- 
tate of his pride. “By God!” he cried to himself, once ; 
“T’m just as good as them, and if they do know lots that 
I don’t, I could learn ’m a few myself, all the same!” 
And the next moment, when she or her mother addressed 
him as “ Mr. Eden,” his aggressive pride was forgotten, 
and he was glowing and warm with delight. He wasa 
civilized man, that was what he was, shoulder to shoulder, 
at dinner, with people he had read about in books. He 
was in the books himself, adventuring through the printed 
pages of bound volumes. 

But while he belied Arthur’s description, and appeared 
a gentle lamb rather than a wild man, he was racking his 
brains for a course of action. He was no gentle lamb,’ 
and the part of second fiddle would never do for the high- 
pitched dominance of his nature. He talked only when 
he had to, and then his speech was like his walk to the 
table, filled with jerks and halts as he groped in his poly- 
glot vocabulary for words, debating over words he knew 
were fit but which he feared he could not pronounce, 
rejecting other words he knew would not be understood 
or would be raw and harsh. But all the time he was 
oppressed by the consciousness that this carefulness of 
diction was making a booby of him, preventing him from 
expressing what he had in him. Also, his love of free- 
dom chafed against the restriction in much the same way 
his neck chafed against the starched fetter of a collar. 
Besides, he was confident that he could not keep it up. 
He was by nature powerful of thought and sensibility, 

c 


18 MARTIN EDEN 


and the creative spirit was restive and urgent. He was 
swiftly mastered by the concept or sensation in him that 
struggled in birth-throes to receive expression and form, 
and then he forgot himself and where he was, and the old 
words — the tools of speech he knew — slipped out. 

Once, he declined something from the servant who 
interrupted and pestered at his shoulder, and he said, 
shortly and emphatically, “Pow!” 

On the instant those at the table were keyed up and 
expectant, the servant was smugly pleased, and he was 
wallowing in mortification. But he recovered himself 
quickly. 

“It’s the Kanaka for ‘finish,’”’ he explained, “and it 
just come out naturally. It’s spelt p-a-u. 

He caught her curious and speculative eyes fixed on his 
hands, and, being in explanatory mood, he said : — 

“‘T just come down the Coast on one of the Pacific mail 
steamers. She was behind time, an’ around the Puget 
Sound ports we worked like niggers, storing cargo — 
mixed freight, if you know what that means. That’s 
how the skin got knocked off.” 

*¢ Oh, it wasn’t that,” she hastened to explain, in turn. 
“Your hands seemed too small for your body.” 

His cheeks were hot. He took it as an exposure of 
another of his deficiencies. 

“Yes,” he said depreciatingly. ‘ ‘They ain’t big enough 
to stand the strain. I can hit like a mule with my arms 
and shoulders. ‘They are too strong, an’ when I smash a 
man on the jaw the hands get smashed, too.” 

He was not happy at what he had said. He was filled 
with disgust at himself. He had loosed the guard upon 
his tongue and talked about things that were not nice. 

“Tt was brave of you to help Arthur the way you did 
—and you a stranger,” she said tactfully, aware of his 
discomfiture though not of the reason for it. 

He, in turn, realized what she had done, and in the 
consequent warm surge of gratefulness that overwhelmed 
him forgot his loose-worded tongue. 

“It wasn’t nothin’ at all,” he said. “ Any guy ’ud do it 


MARTIN EDEN 19 


for another. That bunch of hoodlums was lookin’ for 
trouble, an’ Arthur wasn’t botherin’ ’em none. They 
butted in on ’m, an’ then I butted in on them an’ poked a 
few. ‘That’s where some of the skin off my hands went, 
along with some of the teeth of the gang. I wouldn’t 
’a’ missed it for anything. When I seen —” 

He paused, open-mouthed, on the verge of the pit of 
his own depravity and utter worthlessness to breathe the 
same air she did. And while Arthur took up the tale, for 
the twentieth time, of his adventure with the drunken 
hoodlums on the ferry-boat and of how Martin Eden had 
rushed in and rescued him, that individual, with frowning 
brows, meditated upon the fool he had made of himself, 
and wrestled more determinedly with the problem of how 
he should conduct himself toward these people. He cer- 
tainly had not succeeded so far. He wasn’t of their tribe, 
and he couldn’t talk their lingo, was the way he put it to 
himself. He couldn’t fake being their kind. The mas- 
querade would fail, and besides, masquerade was foreign 
to his nature. There was no room in him for sham or artis, 
fice. Whatever happened, he must bereal. He couldn’t talk 
their talk just yet, though in time he would. Upon that 
he was resolved. But in the meantime, talk he must, and 
it must be his own talk, toned down, of course, so as to be 
comprehensible to them and so as not to shock them too 
much. And furthermore, he wouldn’t claim, not even by 
tacit acceptance, to be familiar with anything that was 
unfamiliar. In pursuance of this decision, when the two 
brothers, talking university shop, had used “ trig” several 
times, Martin Eden demanded: — 3 

“ What is trig ?”’ 

“ Trignometry,” Norman said; ‘a higher form of math.” 

“ And what is math?” was the next question, which, 
somehow, brought the laugh on Norman. 

‘“ Mathematics, arithmetic,” was the answer. 

Martin Eden nodded. He had caught a glimpse of the 
apparently illimitable vistas of knowledge. What he saw 
took on tangibility. His abnormal power of vision made 
abstractions take on concrete form. Inthe alchemy of 


20 MARTIN EDEN 


his brain, trigonometry and mathematics and the whole 
field of knowledge which they betokened were transmuted 
into so much landscape. ‘The vistas he saw were vistas of 
green foliage and forest glades, all softly luminous or shot 
through with flashing lights. In the distance, detail was 
veiled and blurred by a purple haze, but behind this pur- 
ple haze, he knew, was the glamour of the unknown, the 
lure of romance. It was like wine to him. Here was ad- 
venture, something to do with head and hand, a world to 
/ conquer — and straightway from the back of his conscious- 
ness rushed the thought, conquering, to win to her, that lily- 
pale spirit sitting beside him. 

The glimmering vision was rent asunder and dissipated 
by Arthur, who, all evening, had been trying to draw 
his wild man out. Martin Eden remembered his decision. 
For the first time he became himself, consciously and de- 
liberately at first, but soon lost in the joy of creating, in 
making life as he knew it appear before his listeners’ eyes. 
He had been a member of the crew of the smuggling 
schooner Halcyon when she was captured by a revenue 
cutter. He saw with wide eyes, and he could tell what 
he saw. He brought the pulsing sea before them, and the 
men and the ships upon the sea. He communicated his 
power of vision, till they saw with his eyes what he had 
seen. He selected from the vast mass of detail with an 
artist’s touch, drawing pictures of life that glowed and 
burned with light and color, injecting movement so that 
his listeners surged along with him on the flood of rough 
eloquence, enthusiasm, and power. At times he shocked 
them with the vividness of the narrative and his terms of 
speech, but beauty always followed fast upon the heels of 
violence, and tragedy was relieved by humor, by interpre- 
tations of the strange twists and quirks of sailors’ minds. 

And while he talked, the girl looked at him with startled 
eyes. His fire warmed her. She wondered if she had been 
cold all her days. She wanted to lean toward this burn- 
ing, blazing man that was like a volcano spouting forth 
strength, robustness, and health. She felt that she must 
lean toward him, and resisted by an effort. ‘Then, too, 


MARTIN EDEN ZA 


there was the counter impulse to shrink away from him. 
She was repelled by those lacerated hands, grimed by toil 
so that the very dirt of life was ingrained in the flesh 
itself, by that red chafe of the collar and those bulging 
muscles. His roughness frightened her; each roughness 
of speech was an insult to her ear, each rough phase of his 
life an insult to her soul. And ever and again would 
come the draw of him, till she thought he must be evil to 
have such power over her. All that was most firmly es- 
tablished in her mind was rocking. His romance and 
adventure were battering at the conventions. Before his 
facile perils and ready laugh, life was no longer an affair 
of serious effort and restraint, but a toy, to be played with 
amd turned topsy-turvy, carelessly to be lived and pleas- 
ured in, and carelessly to be flung aside. ‘“ Therefore, 
play!” was the cry that rang through her. “ Lean toward 
him, if so you will, and place your two hands upon his 
neck!” She wanted to cry out at the recklessness of the 
thought, and in vain she appraised her own cleanness and 
culture and balanced all that she was against what he was 
not. She glanced about her and saw the others gazing at 
him with rapt attention; and she would have despaired 
had not she seen horror in her mother’s eyes —fascinated 
horror, it was true, but none the less horror. This man 


from outer darkness was evil. Her mother saw it, and 


her mother was right. She would trust her mother’s 
judgment in this as she had always trusted it in all things. 
The fire of him was no longer warm, and the fear of him 
was no longer poignant. 

Later, at the piano, she played for him, and at him, 
aggressively, with the vague intent of emphasizing the 
impassableness of the gulf that separated them. Her 
music was a club that she swung brutally upon his head; 
and though it stunned him and crushed him down, it in- 
cited him. He gazed upon her in awe. In his mind, as 
in her own, the gulf widened; but faster than it widened, 
towered his ambition to win across it. But he was too 


J 


complicated a plexus of sensibilities to sit staring at a gulf © 


a whole evening, especially when there was music. He 


22 MARTIN EDEN 


was remarkably susceptible to music. It was like strong 
drink, firing him to audacities of feeling, —a drug that laid 
hold of his imagination and went cloud-soaring through the 
sky. It banished sordid fact, flooded his mind with beauty, 
loosed romance and to its heels added wings. He did not 
understand the music she played. It was different from 
the dance-hall piano-banging and blatant brass bands he 
had heard. But he had caught hints of such music from 
the books, and he accepted her playing largely on faith, 
patiently waiting, at first, for the lilting measures of pro- 
nounced and simple rhythm, puzzled because those meas- 
ures were not long continued. Just as he caught the 
swing of them and started, his imagination attuned in 
flight, always they vanished away in a chaotic scramble of 
sounds that was meaningless to him, and that dropped his 
imagination, an inert weight, back to earth. 

Once, it entered his mind that there was a deliberate 
rebuff in all this. He caught her spirit of antagonism and 
strove to divine the message that her hands pronounced 
upon the keys. Then he dismissed the thought as un- 
worthy and impossible, and yielded himself more freely to 
the music. The old delightful condition began to be in- 
duced. His feet were no longer clay, and his flesh became 
spirit; before his eyes and behind his eyes shone a great 
glory; and then the scene before him vanished and he was 
away, rocking over the world that was to him a very dear 
world. ‘The known and the unknown were commingled in 
the dream-pageant that thronged his vision. He entered 
strange ports of sun-washed lands, and trod market-places 
among barbaric peoples that no man had ever seen. ‘The 
scent of the spice islands was in his nostrils as he had 
known it on warm, breathless nights at sea, or he beat up 
against the southeast trades through long tropic days, 
sinking palm-tufted coral islets in the turquoise sea behind 
and lifting palm-tufted coral islets in the turquoise sea ahead. 
Swift as thought the pictures came and went. One instant 
he was astride a broncho and flying through the fairy- 
colored Painted Desert country; the next instant he was 
gazing down through shimmering heat into the whited 


MARTIN EDEN 23 


sepulchre of Death Valley, or pulling an oar on a freezing 
ocean where great ice islands towered and glistened in the 
sun. He lay on a coral beach where the cocoanuts grew 
down to the mellow-sounding surf. The hulk of an ancient 
wreck burned with blue fires, in the light of which danced 
the hula dancers to the barbaric love-calls of the singers, 
who chanted to tinklng wkuleles and rumbling tom-toms. 
It was a sensuous, tropic night. In the background a 
volcano crater was silhouetted against the stars. Over- 
head drifted a pale crescent moon, and the Southern Cross 
burned low in the sky. 

He was a harp; all life that he had known and that was 
his consciousness was the strings; and the flood of music 
was a wind that poured against those strings and set them 
vibrating with memories and dreams. He did not merely 
feel. Sensation invested itself in form and color and 
radiance, and what his imagination dared, it objectified in 
some sublimated and magic way. fast, present, and 
future mingled; and he went on oscillating across the 
broad, warm world, through high adventure and noble 
deeds to Her—ay, and with her, winning her, his arm 
about her, and carrying her on in flight through the empery 
of his mind. 

And she, glancing at him across her shoulder, saw some- 
thing of all this in his face. It was a transfigured face, 
with great shining eyes that gazed beyond the veil of 
sound and saw behind it the leap and pulse of life and the 
gigantic phantoms of the spirit. She was startled. The 
raw, stumbling lout was gone. ‘The ill-fitting clothes, 
battered hands, and sunburned face remained; but these 
seemed the prison-bars through which she saw a great soul» 
looking forth, inarticulate and dumb because of those 
feeble lips that would not give it speech. Only for a 
flashing moment did she see this, then she saw the lout 
returned, and she laughed at the whim of her fancy. But 
the impression of that fleeting glimpse lingered, and when 
the time came for him to beat a stumbling retreat and go, 
she lent him the volume of Swinburne, and another of 
Browning — she was studying Browning in one of her 


24 MARTIN EDEN 


English courses. He seemed such a boy, as he stood 
blushing and stammering his thanks, that a wave of pity, 
maternal in its prompting, welled up in her. She did not 
remember the lout, nor the imprisoned soul, nor the man 
who had stared at her in all masculineness and delighted 
and frightened her. She saw before her only a boy, who 
was shaking her hand with a hand so calloused that it felt 
like a nutmeg-grater and rasped her skin, and who was~ 
saying jerkily :— 

“The greatest time of my life. You see, I ain’t used to 
things. . . .” He looked about him helplessly. “To 
people and houses like this. It’s all new to me, and I 
like it.” 

“TI hope you'll call again,’ 
good night to her brothers. 

He pulled on his cap, lurched desperately through the 
doorway, and was gone. 

“ Well, what do you think of him?” Arthur demanded. 

“He is most interesting, a whiff of ozone,” she answered. 
“ How old is he?” 

“ Twenty — almost twenty-one. I asked him this after- 
noon. I didn’t think he was that young.” 

And I am three years older, was the thought in her 
mind as she kissed her brothers good night. 


’ she said, as he was saying 


CHAPTER III 


As Martin Eden went down the steps, his hand dropped 
into his coat pocket. It came out with a brown rice 
paper and a pinch of Mexican tobacco, which were deftly 
rolled together into a cigarette. He drew the first whiff 
of smoke deep into his lungs and expelled it in a long 
and lingering exhalation. “By God!” he said aloud, in 
a voice of awe and wonder. “By God!” he repeated. 
And yet again he murmured, “By God!” Then his hand 
went to his collar, which he ripped out of the shirt and 
stuffed into his pocket. A cold drizzle was falling, but 
he bared his head to it and unbuttoned his vest, swinging 
along in splendid unconcern. He was only dimly aware 
that it was raining. He was in an ecstasy, dreaming 
dreams and reconstructing the scenes just past. 

He had met the woman at last — the woman that he had 
thought little about, not being given to thinking about 
women, but whom he had expected, in a remote way, 
he would sometime meet. He had sat next to her at 
table. He had felt her hand in his, he had looked into 
her eyes and caught a vision of a beautiful spirit; — but 
no more beautiful than the eyes through which it shone, 
nor than the flesh that gave it expression andform. He did 
not think of her flesh as flesh,— which was new to him; 
for of the women he had known that was the only way 
he thought. Her flesh was somehow different. He did 
not conceive of her body as a body, subject to the ills 
and frailties of bodies. Her body was more than the 
garb of her spirit. It was an emanation of her spirit, 
a pure and gracious crystallization of her divine essence. 
This feeling of the divine startled him. It shocked him 
from his dreams to sober thought. No word, no clew, 
no hint, of the divine had ever reached him before. He 

25 


26 MARTIN EDEN 


had never believed in the divine. He had always been 
wirreligious, scoffing good-naturedly at the sky-pilots and 
their immortality of the soul. There was no life beyond, 
he had contended; it was here and now, then darkness 
everlasting. But what he had seen in her eyes was soul 
—immortal soul that could never die. No man he had- 
known, nor any woman, had given him the message of 
immortality. But she had. She had whispered it to him 
the first moment she looked at him. Her face shimmered 
before his eyes as he walked along,—pale and serious, 
sweet and sensitive, smiling with pity and tenderness as 
only a spirit could smile, and pure as he had never 
dreamed purity could be. Her purity smote him like a 
blow. It startled him. He had known good and bad; 
but purity, as an attribute of existence, had never entered 
his mind. And now, in her, he conceived purity to be 
the superlative of goodness and of cleanness, the sum 
of which constituted eternal life. 

And promptly urged his ambition to grasp at eternal 
life. He was not fit to carry water for her—he knew 
that; it was a miracle of luck and a fantastic stroke 
that had enabled him to see her and be with her and talk 
with her that night. It was accidental. There was no 
merit in it. Hedid not deserve such fortune. His mood 
was essentially religious. He was humble and meek, 
filled with self-disparagement and abasement. In such 
frame of mind sinners come to the penitent form. He 
was convicted of sin. But as the meek and lowly at the 
penitent form catch splendid glimpses of their future 
lordly existence, so did he catch similar glimpses of the 
state he would gain to by possessing her. But this 
possession of her was dim and nebulous and totally dif- 
ferent from possession as he had known it. Ambition 
soared on mad wings, and he saw himself climbing the 
heights with her, sharing thoughts with her, pleasuring in 
beautiful and noble things with her. It was a soul-posses- 
sion he dreamed, refined beyond any grossness, a free 
comradeship of spirit that he could not put into definite 
thought. He did not think it. For that matter, he did 


MARTIN EDEN 27 


not think at all. Sensation usurped reason, and he was 
quivering and palpitant with emotions he had never known, 
drifting deliciously on a sea of sensibility where feeling 
itself was exalted and spiritualized and carried beyond 
the summits of life. 

He staggered along hkeadrunken man, murmuring fer- 
vently aloud: “ By God! By God!” 

A policeman on a street corner eyed him suspiciously, 
then noted his sailor roll. 

*“ Where did you get it?” the policeman demanded. 

Martin Eden came back to earth. His was a fluid or- 


ganism, swiftly adjustable, capable of flowing into and 


filling all sorts of nooks and crannies. With the police- 
man’s hail he was immediately his ordinary self, grasping 
the situation clearly. 

“It’s a beaut, ain’t it?” he laughed back. “I didn’t 
know I was talkin’ out loud.” 

“ You'll be singing next,” was the policeman’s diagnosis. 

‘No, I won’t. Gimmea match an’ [ll catch the next 
car home.” 

He lighted his cigarette, said good night, and went on. 
“Now wouldn’t that rattle you?” he ejaculated under 
his breath. ‘That copper thought I was drunk.” He 
smiled to himself and meditated. “I guess I was,” he 
added ; “but I didn’t think a woman’s face’d do it.” 

He caught a Telegraph Avenue car that was going to 
Berkeley. It was crowded with youths and young men 
who were singing songs and ever and again barking out 
college yells. He studied them curiously. They were 
university boys. ‘They went to the same university that 
she did, were in her class socially, could know her, could 
see her every day if they wanted to. He wondered that 
they did not want to, that they had been out having a 
good time instead of being with her that evening, talking 
with her, sitting around her in a worshipful and adoring 
circle. His thoughts wandered on. He noticed one 
with narrow-slitted eyes and a loose-lipped mouth. That 
fellow was vicious, he decided. On shipboard he would 
be a sneak, a whiner, a tattler. He, Martin Eden, was a 


28 MARTIN EDEN 


better man than that fellow. The thought cheered him. 
It seemed to draw him nearer to Her. He began com- 
paring himself with the students. He grew conscious of 
the muscled mechanism of his body and felt confident 
that he was physically their master. But their heads 
were filled with knowledge that enabled them to talk her 
talk, — the thought depressed him. But what wasa brain 
for? he demanded passionately. What they had done, 
he could do. They had been studying about life from the 
books while he had been busy living life. His brain was 
just as full of knowledge as theirs, though it was a differ- 
ent kind of knowledge. How many of them could tie a 
lanyard knot, or take a wheel or a lookout? His life 
spread out before him in a series of pictures of danger 
and daring, hardship and toil. He remembered his fail- 
ures and scrapes in the process of learning. He was that 
much to the good, anyway. Later on they would have 
to begin living life and going through the mill as he had 
gone. Very well. While they were busy with that, he 
could be learning the other side of life from the books. 
As the car crossed the zone of scattered dwellings that 
separated Oakland from Berkeley, he kept a lookout for a 
familiar, two-story building along the front of which ran 
the proud sign, HIGGINBOTHAM’S CASH STORE. 
Martin Eden got off at this corner. He stared up fora 
moment at the sign. It carried a message to him beyond 
its mere wording. A personality of smallness and egotism 
and petty underhandedness seemed to emanate from the 
letters themselves. Bernard Higginbotham had married 
his sister, and he knew him well. He let himself in with 
a latch-key and climbed the stairs to the second floor. 
Here lived his brother-in-law. The grocery was below. 
There was a smell of stale vegetables in the air. As he 
groped his way across the hall he stumbled over a toy- 
cart, left there by one of his numerous nephews and 
nieces, and brought up against a door with a resounding 
bang. “The pincher,” was his thought; “too miserly to 
burn two cents’ worth of gas and save his boarders’ necks.” 
He fumbled for the knob and entered a lighted room, 


MARTIN EDEN 29 


where sat his sister and Bernard Higginbotham. She 
was patching a pair of his trousers, while his lean body 
was distributed over two chairs, his feet dangling in 
dilapidated carpet-slippers over the edge of the second 
chair. He glanced across the top of the paper he was 
reading, showing a pair of dark, insincere, sharp-staring 
eyes. Martin Eden never looked at him without experi- 
encing a sense of repulsion. What his sister had seen in 
the man was beyond him. The other affected him as so 
much vermin, and always aroused in him an impulse to 
crush him under his foot. ‘Some day I'll beat the face off 
of him,” was the way he often consoled himself for endur- 
ing the man’s existence. The eyes, weasel-like and cruel, 
were looking at him complainingly. 

* Well,” Martin demanded. ‘ Out with it.” 

“JT had that door painted only last week,” Mr. Higgin- 
botham half whined, half bullied; “and you know what 
union wages are. You should be more careful.” 

Martin had intended to reply, but he was struck by the 
hopelessness of it. He gazed across the monstrous sordid- 
ness of soul to a chromo on the wall. It surprised him. 
He had always liked it, but it seemed that now he was 
seeing it for the first time. It was cheap, that was what 
it was, like everything else in this house. His mind went 
back to the house he had just left, and he saw, first, the 
paintings, and next, Her, looking at him with melting 
sweetness as she shook his hand at leaving. He forgot. 
where he was and Bernard Higginbotham’s existence, till 
that gentleman demanded : — 

«Seen a ghost ?” 

Martin came back and looked at the beady eyes, sneer- 
ing, truculent, cowardly, and there leaped into his vision, 
as on a screen, the same eyes when their owner was mak- 
ing a sale in the store below — subservient eyes, smug, and 
oily, and flattering. 

“ Yes,” Martin answered. “I seenaghost. Good night. 
Good night, Gertrude.” 

He started to leave the room, tripping over a loose seam 
in the slatternly carpet. 


30 MARTIN EDEN 


“Don’t bang the door,” Mr. Higginbotham cautioned 
him. 

He felt the blood crawl in his veins, but controlled him- 
self and closed the door softly behind him. 

Mr. Higginbotham looked at his wife exultantly. 

‘¢ He’s ben drinkin’,” he proclaimed ina hoarse whisper. 
“T told you he would.” 

She nodded her head resignedly. 

“ His eyes was pretty shiny,” she confessed; “and he 
didn’t have no collar, though he went away with one. But 
mebbe he didn’t have more’n a couple of glasses.” 

“ He couldn’t stand up straight,” asserted her husband. 
“T watched him. He couldn’t walk across the floor with- 
out stumblin’. You heard ’m yourself almost fall down in 
the hall.” 

“TIT think it was over Alice’s cart,” she said. ‘He 
couldn’t see it in the dark.” 

Mr. Higginbotham’s voice and wrath began to rise. All 
day he effaced himself in the store, reserving for the even- 
ing, with his family, the privilege of being himself. 

“TI tell you that precious brother of yours was drunk.” 

His voice was cold, sharp, and final, his lps stamping 
the enunciation of each word like the die of a machine. 
His wife sighed and remained silent. She was a large, 
stout woman, always dressed slatternly and always tired 
from the burdens of her flesh, her work, and her husband. 

“ He’s got it in him, I tell you, from his father,” Mr. 
Higginbotham went on accusingly. ‘An’ he’ll croak in 
the gutter the same way. You know that.” 

She nodded, sighed, and went on stitching. They were 
agreed that Martin had come home drunk. They did not 
have it in their souls to know beauty, or they would have 
known that those shining eyes and that glowing face be- 


~“ tokened youth’s first vision of love. 


“ Settin’ a fine example to the children,” Mr. Higgin- 
botham snorted, suddenly, in the silence for which his wife 
was responsible and which he resented. Sometimes he al- 
most wished she would oppose him more. “If he does it 
again, he’s got to get out. Understand! I won’t put up 


MARTIN EDEN ol 


with his shinanigan —debotchin’ innocent children with 
his boozing.” Mr. Higginbotham liked the word, which 
was a new one in his vocabulary, recently gleaned from a 
newspaper column. ‘“That’s what it is, debotchin’ — 
there ain’t no other name for it.” 

Still his wife sighed, shook her head sorrowfully, and 
stitched on. Mr. Higginbotham resumed the newspaper. 

*“ Has he paid last week’s board?” he shot across the 
top of the newspaper. 

She nodded, then added, “ He still has some money.” 

“ When is he goin’ to sea again?” 

“ When his pay-day’s spent, I guess,” she answered. 
“He was over to San Francisco yesterday looking for a 
ship. But he’s got money, yet, an’ he’s particular about 
the kind of ship he signs for.” 

“It’s not for a deck-swab like him to put on airs,” Mr. 
Higginbotham snorted. “ Particular! Him!” 

“ He said something about a schooner that’s gettin’ 
ready to go off to some outlandish place to look for buried 
treasure, that he’d sail on her if his money held out.” 

“Tf he only wanted to steady down, I’d give him a job 
drivin’ the wagon,” her husband said, but with no trace of 
benevolence in his voice. ‘'Tom’s quit.” 

His wife looked alarm and interrogation. 

“Quit to-night. Is goin’ to work for Carruthers. 
They paid ’m more’n I could afford.” 

“T told you you’d lose ’m,” she cried out. “He was 
worth more’n you was giving him.” 

“ Now look here, old woman,” Higginbotham bullied, 
“for the thousandth time I’ve told you to keep your nose 
out of the business. I won’t tell you again.” 

“T don’t care,” she sniffled. ‘Tom was a good boy.” 

Her husband glared at her. This was unqualified 
defiance. . 

“Tf that brother of yours was worth his salt, he could 
take the wagon,” he snorted. 

“He pays his board, just the same,” was the retort. 
“ An’ he’s my brother, an’ so long as he don’t owe you 
money you’ve got no right to be jumping on him all the 


9 


o2 MARTIN EDEN 


time. I’ve got some feelings, if I have been married to 
you for seven years.” 

“Did you tell ’m you’d charge him for gas if he goes on 
readin’ in bed ?”’ he demanded. } 

Mrs. Higginbotham made no reply. Her revolt faded 
away, her spirit wilting down into her tired flesh. Her 
husband was triumphant. He had her. His eyes snapped 
vindictively, while his ears joyed in the sniffles she emitted. 
He extracted great’ happiness from squelching her, and 
she squelched easily these days, though it had been dif- 
ferent in the first years of their married life, before the 
brood of children and his incessant nagging had sapped 
her energy. 

* Well, you tell ’m to-morrow, that’s all,” he said. ‘ An’ 
I just want to tell you, before I forget it, that you’d better 
send for Marian to-morrow to take care of the children. 
With Tom quit, Pll have to be out on the wagon, an’ you 
can make up your mind to it to be down below waitin’ on 
the counter.” 

‘“‘ But to-morrow’s wash day,” she objected weakly. 

“Get up early, then, an’ do it first. I won’t start out 
till ten o’clock.” 

He crinkled the paper viciously and resumed his reading. 


CHAPTER IV 


MARTIN EDEN, with blood still crawling from contact 
with his brother-in-law, felt his way along the unlighted 
back hall and entered his room, a tiny cubbyhole with 
space for a bed, a wash-stand, and one chair. Mr. Hig- 
ginbotham was too thrifty to keep a servant when his 
wife could do the work. Besides, the servant’s room en- 
abled them to take in two boarders instead of one. Mar- 
tin placed the Swinburne and Browning on the chair, 
took off his coat, and sat down on the bed. A screeching 
of asthmatic springs greeted the weight of his body, but 
he did not notice them. He started to take off his shoes, 
but fell to staring at the white plaster wall opposite him, 
broken by long streaks of dirty brown where rain had 
leaked through the roof. On this befouled background 
visions began to flow and burn. He forgot his shoes and 
stared long, till his lips began to move and he murmured, 
south.” 

“Ruth.” He had not thought a simple sound could 
be so beautiful. It delighted his ear, and he grew in- 
toxicated with the repetition of it. “Ruth.” It was a 
talisman, a magic word to conjure with. Hach time he 
murmured it, her face shimmered before him, suffusing 
the foul wall with a golden radiance. ‘This radiance did 
not stop at the wall. It extended on into infinity, and 
through its golden depths his soul went questing after 
hers. The best that was in him was pouring out in 
splendid flood. The very thought of her ennobled and 
purified him, made him better, and made him want to be 
better. This was new to him. He had never known 
women who had made him better. ‘They had always had 
the counter effect of making him beastly. He did not 

D 33 


34 MARTIN EDEN 


know that many of them had done their best, bad as it 
was. Never having been conscious of himself, he did not 
know that he had that in his being that drew love from 
women and which had been the cause of their reaching 
out for his youth. Though they had often bothered him, 
he had never bothered about them; and he would never 
have dreamed that there were women who had been better 
because of him. Always in sublime carelessness had he 
lived, till now, and now it seemed to him that they had al- 
ways reached out and dragged at him with vile hands. 
This was not just to them, nor to himself. But he, who 
for the first time was becoming conscious of himself, was 
in no condition to judge, and he burned with shame as 
he stared at the vision of his infamy. 

He got up abruptly and tried to see himself in the 
dirty looking-glass over the wash-stand. He passed a 
towel over it and looked again, long and carefully. It 
was the first time he had ever really seen himself. His 
eyes were made for seeing, but up to that moment they 
had been filled with the ever changing panorama of the 
world, at which he had been too busy gazing, ever to gaze 
at himself. He saw the head and face of a young fellow of 
twenty, but, being unused to such appraisement, he did not 
know how to value it. Above a square-domed forehead he 
saw a mop of brown hair, nut-brown, with a wave to it 
and hints of curls that were a delight to any woman, mak- 
ing hands tingle to stroke it and fingers tingle to pass 
caresses through it. But he passed it by as without 
merit, in Her eyes, and dwelt long and thoughtfully on 
the high, square forehead, — striving to penetrate it and 
learn the quality of its content. What kind of a brain 
lay behind there? was his insistent interrogation. What 
was it capable of ? How far would it take him? Would 
it take him to her? 

He wondered if there was soul in those steel-gray eyes 
that were often quite blue of color and that were strong 
with the briny airs of the sun-washed deep. He won- 
dered, also, how his eyes looked to her. He tried to im- 
agine himself she, gazing into those eyes of his, but failed 


MARTIN EDEN 35 


in the jugglery. He could successfully put himself inside 
other men’s minds, but they had to be men whose ways 
of life he knew. He did not know her way of life. She 
was wonder and mystery, and how could he guess one 
thought of hers? Well, they were honest eyes, he con- 
cluded, and in them was neither smallness nor meanness. 
The brown sunburn of his face surprised him. He had 
not dreamed he was so black. He rolled up his shirt- 
sleeve and compared the white underside of the arm 
with his face. Yes, he was a white man, after all. But 
the arms were sunburned, too. He twisted his arm, 
rolled the biceps over with his other hand, and gazed 
underneath where he was least touched by the sun. It 
was very white. He laughed at his bronzed face in 
the glass at the thought that it was once as white as 
the underside of his arm; nor did he dream that in the 
world there were few pale spirits of women who could 
boast fairer or smoother skins than he—fairer than 
where he had escaped the ravages of the sun. 

His might have been a cherub’s mouth, had not the 
full, sensuous lips a trick, under stress, of drawing firmly 
across the teeth. At times, so tightly did they draw, the 
mouth became stern and harsh, even ascetic. ‘They were 
the lips of a fighter and of a lover. They could taste 
the sweetness of life with relish, and they could put the 
sweetness aside and command life. The chin and jaw, 
strong and just hinting of square aggressiveness, helped 

he lips to command life. Strength balanced sensuous- 
ness and had upon it a tonic “effect, ‘compelling him to 
‘tove beauty that was healthy and making him vibrate to 
sensations that were wholesome. And between the lips 
were teeth that had never known nor needed the dentist’s 
care. They were white and strong and regular, he de- 
cided, as he looked at them. But as he looked, he began 
to be troubled. Somewhere, stored away in the recesses 
of his mind and vaguely remembered, was the impression 
that there were people who washed their teeth every day. 
They were the people from up above — people in her class. 
She must wash her teeth every day, too. What would she 


36 MARTIN EDEN 


think if she learned that he had never washed his teeth in 
all the days of his life? He resolved to get a tooth-brush 
and form the habit. He would begin at once, to-morrow. 
It was not by mere achievement that he could hope to 
win to her. He must make a personal reform in all 
things, even to tooth-washing and neck-gear, though a 
starched collar affected him as a renunciation of freedom. 

He held up his hand, rubbing the ball of the thumb over 
the calloused palm and gazing at the dirt that was ingrained 
in the flesh itself and which no brush could scrub away. 
How different was her palm! He thrilled deliciously at 
the remembrance. Like a rose-petal, he thought; cool and 
soft as a snowflake. He had never thought that a mere 
woman’s hand could be so sweetly soft. He caught him- 
self imagining the wonder of a caress from such a hand, 
and flushed guiltily. It was too gross a thought for her. 
In ways it seemed to impugn her high spirituality. She 
was a pale, slender spirit, exalted far beyond the flesh; but 
nevertheless the softness of her palm persisted in his 
thoughts. He was used to the harsh callousness of fac- 
tory girls and working women. Well he knew why their 
hands were rough; but this hand of hers... It was 
soft because she had never used it to work with. The 
gulf yawned between herand him at the awesome thought 
of a person who did not have to work for a living. He 
suddenly saw the aristocracy of the people who did not 


‘y labor. It towered before him on the wall, a figure in 


brass, arrogant and powerful. He had worked himself ; 
his first memories seemed connected with work, and all 
his family had worked. There was Gertrude. When her 
hands were not hard from the endless housework, they were 
swollen and red like boiled beef, what of the washing. 
And there was his sister Marian. She had worked in the 
cannery the preceding summer, and her slim, pretty hands 
were all scarred with the tomato-knives. Besides, the 
tips of two of her fingers had been left in the cutting ma- 
chine at the paper-box factory the preceding winter. He 
remembered the hard palms of his mother as she lay in 
her coffin. And his father had worked to the last fading 


MARTIN EDEN Oo” 


gasp; the horned growth on his hands must have been 
half an inch thick when he died. But Her hands were 
soft, and her mother’s hands, and her brothers’. This 
last came to him as a surprise; it was tremendously in- 
dicative of the highness of their caste, of the enormous 
distance that stretched between her and him. 

He sat back on the bed with a bitter laugh, and finished 
taking off his shoes. He was a fool; he had been made 
drunken by a woman’s face and by a woman’s soft, white 
hands. And then, suddenly, before his eyes, on the foul 
plaster-wall appeared a vision. He stood in front of a 
gloomy tenement house. It was night-time, in the East 
End of London, and before him stood Margey, a little fac- 
tory girl of fifteen. He had seen her home after the bean- 
feast. She lived in that gloomy tenement, a place not fit 
for swine. His hand was going out to hers as he said 
good night. She had put her lips up to be kissed, but he 
wasn't going to kiss her. Somehow he was afraid of her. 
And then her hand closed on his and pressed feverishly. 
He felt her callouses grind and grate on his, and a great 
wave of pity welled over him. He saw her yearning, hun- 
ery eyes, and her ill-fed female form which had been rushed 
from childhood into a frightened and ferocious maturity ; 
then he put his arms about her in large tolerance and 
stooped and kissed her on the lips. Her glad little cry 
rang in his ears, and he felt her clinging to him like a cat. 
Poor little starveling! He continued to stare at the vision 
of what had happened in the long ago. His flesh was 
crawling as it had crawled that night when she clung to 
him, and his heart was warm with pity. It was a gray 
scene, greasy gray, and the rain drizzled greasily on the 
pavement stones. And then a radiant glory shone on the 
wall, and up through the other vision, displacing it, glim- 
mered Her pale face under its crown of golden hair, re- 
mote and inaccessible as a star. 

He took the Browning and the Swinburne from the chair 
and kissed them. Just the same, she told me to callagain, 
he thought. He took another look at himself in the glass, 
and said aloud, with great solemnity : — 


08 MARTIN EDEN 


“Martin Eden, the first thing to-morrow you go to the 
free library an’ read up on etiquette. Understand!” 

He turned off the gas, and the springs shrieked under 
his body. 

“But you've got to quit cussin’, Martin, old boy ; you ve 
got to quit cussin’,”’ he said aloud. 

Then he dozed off to sleep and to dream dreams that 
for madness and audacity rivalled those of poppy-eaters. 


CHAPTER V 


HE awoke next morning from rosy scenes of dream to a 
steamy atmosphere that smelled of soapsuds and dirty 
clothes, and that was vibrant with the jar and jangle of 
tormented life. As he came out of his room he heard the 
slosh of water, a sharp exclamation, and a resounding 
smack as his sister visited her irritation upon one of her 
numerous progeny. The squall of the child went through 
him like a knife. He was aware that the whole thing, the 
very air he breathed, was repulsive and mean. How dif- 
ferent, he thought, from the atmosphere of beauty and 
repose of the house wherein Ruth dwelt. There it was all . 
spiritual. Here it was all material, and meanly material. 

“Come here, Alfred,” he called to the crying child, at 
the same time thrusting his hand into his trousers pocket, 
where he carried his money loose in the same large way 
that he lived life in general. He put a quarter in the 
youngster’s hand and held him in his arms a moment, 
soothing his sobs. ‘Now run along and get some candy, 
and don’t forget to give some to your brothers and sisters. 
Be sure and get the kind that lasts longest.”’ 

His sister lifted a flushed face from the wash-tub and 
looked at him. 

“A nickel’d ha’ ben enough,” she said. “It’s just like 
you, no idea of the value of money. ‘The child’ll eat him- 
self sick.” 

“« That’s all right, sis,” he answered jovially. “My 
money’ll take care of itself. If you weren’t so busy, Pd 
kiss you good morning.” 

He wanted to be affectionate to this sister, who was 
good, and who, in her way, he knew, loved him. But, 
somehow, she grew less herself as the years went by, and 

39 


40 MARTIN EDEN 


more and more baffling. It was the hard work, the many 
children, and the nagging of her husband, he decided, that 
had changed her. It came to him, ina flash of fancy, that 
her nature seemed taking on the attributes of stale vege- 
tables, smelly soapsuds, and of the greasy dimes, nickels, 
and quarters she took in over the counter of the store. 

“Go along an’ get your breakfast,” she said roughly, 
though secretly pleased. Of all her wandering brood of 
brothers he had always been her favorite. “I declare I 
will kiss you,” she said, with a sudden stir at her heart. 

With thumb and forefinger she swept the dripping suds 
first from one arm and then from the other. He put his 
armsround her massive waist and kissed her wet, steamy lips. 
The tears welled into her eyes—not so much from 
strength of feeling as from the weakness of chronic over- 
work. She shoved him away from her, but not before he 
caught a glimpse of her moist eyes. 

* You'll find breakfast in the oven,” she said hurriedly. 
“ Jim ought to be up now. I had to get up early for the 
washing. Now get along with you and get out of the 
house early. It won’t be nice to-day, what of Tom quit- 
tin’ an’ nobody but Bernard to drive the wagon.” 

Martin went into the kitchen with a sinking heart, the 
image of her red face and slatternly form eating its way 
like acid into his brain. She might love him if she onl 
had some time,he concluded. Butshe was workedto death. 
Bernard Higginbotham was a brute to work her so hard. 
But he could not help but feel, on the other hand, that 
there had not been anything beautiful in that kiss. It was 
true, it was an unusual kiss. For years she had kissed 
him only when he returned from voyages or departed on 
voyages. But this kiss had tasted of soapsuds, and the 
lips, he had noticed, were flabby. There had been no 
quick, vigorous lip-pressure such as should accompany any 
kiss. Hers was the kiss of a tired woman who had been 
tired so long that she had forgotten how to kiss. He re- 
membered her as a girl, before her marriage, when she 
would dance with the best, all night, after a hard day’s 
work at the laundry, and think nothing of leaving the 


MARTIN EDEN 4] 


dance to go to another day’s hard work, And then he 
thought of Ruth and the cool sweetness that must re- 
side in her lips as it resided in all about her. Her kiss 
would be like her hand-shake or the way she looked at one, 
firm and frank. In imagination he dared to think of her 
lips on his, and so vividly did he imagine that he went 
dizzy at the thought and seemed to rift through clouds of 
rose-petals, filling his brain with their perfume. 

In the kitchen he found Jim, the other boarder, eating 
mush very languidly, with a sick, far-away look in his 
eyes. Jim was a plumber’s apprentice whose weak chin 
and hedonistic temperament, coupled with a certain ner- 
vous stupidity, promised to take him nowhere in the race 
for bread and butter. 

“ Why don’t you eat ?” he demanded, as Martin dipped 
dolefully into the cold, half-cooked oatmeal mush. ‘ Was 
you drunk again last night ?” 

Martin shook his head. He was oppressed by the utter 
squalidness of it all. Ruth Morse seemed farther removed 
than ever. 

“I was,” Jim went on with a boastful, nervous giggle. 
“T was loaded right to the neck. Oh, she was a daisy. 
Billy brought me home.” 

Martin nodded that he heard, —it was a habit of nature 
with him to pay heed to whoever talked to him, — and 
poured a cup of lukewarm coffee. 

*“ Goin’ to the Lotus Club dance to-night?” Jim de- 
manded. ‘ They’re goin’ to have beer, an’ if that Tem- 
escal bunch comes, there'll be a rough-house. I don’t 
care, though. I’m takin’ my lady friend just the same. 
Cripes, but I’ve got a taste in my mouth!” 

He made awry face and attempted to wash the taste 
away with coffee. 

* D’ye know Julia?” 

Martin shook his head. 

“She’s my lady friend,” Jim explained, “and she’s a 
peach. Id introduce you to her, only you'd win her. 
I don’t see what the girls see in you, honest I don’t; but 


re? 


the way you win them away from the fellers is sickenin’. 


42 MARTIN EDEN 


“T never got any away from you,” Martin answered unin- 
terestedly. The breakfast had to be got through somehow. 

“ Yes, you did, too,” the other asserted warmly. ‘There 
was Maggie.” 

“Never had anything to do with her. Never danced 
with her except that one night.” 

“Yes, an’ that’s just what did it,” Jim cried out. 
“ You just danced with her an’ looked at her, an’ it was 
all off. Of course you didn’t mean nothin’ by it, but 
it settled me for keeps. Wouldn’t look at me again. 
Always askin’ about you. She’d have made fast dates 
enough with you if you’d wanted to.” 

“ But I didn’t want to.” 

“ Wasn’tnecessary. I wasleftat the pole.” Jim looked 
at him admiringly. “ How d’ye do it, anyway, Mart?” 

“By not carin’ about em,” was the answer. 

‘You mean makin’ b’lieve you don’t care about them ?” 
Jim queried eagerly. 

Martin considered for a moment, then answered, “ Per- 
haps that will do, but with me I guess it’s-different. I 
never have cared— much. If you can put it on, it’s all 
right, most likely.” 

‘You should ’a’ ben up at Riley’s barn last night,’ Jim 
announced inconsequently. ‘A lot of the fellers put 
on the gloves. ‘There was a peach from West Oakland. 
They called ’m ‘The Rat.’ Slick as-silk. No one could 
touch’m. We was all wishin’ you was there. Where 
was you anyway ?” 

“ Down in Oakland,” Martin replied. 

“To the show ?” 

Martin shoved his plate away and got up. 

“ Comin’ to the dance to-night?” the other called 
after him. 

“ No, I think not,” he answered. 

He went downstairs and out into the street, breathing 
great breaths of air. He had been suffocating in that 
atmosphere, while the apprentice’s chatter had driven him 
frantic. ‘There had been times when it was all he 
could do to refrain from reaching over and mop- 


MARTIN EDEN 43 


ping Jim’s face in the mush-plate. The more he had 
chattered, the more remote had Ruth seemed to him. 
How could he, herding with such cattle, ever become 
worthy of her? He was appalled at the problem con- 
fronting him, weighted down by the incubus of his work-_ 
ing-class station. Everything reached out to hold him 
down — his sister, his sister’s house and family, Jim the 
apprentice, everybody he knew, every tie of life. Exist- 
ence did not taste good in his mouth. Upto then he had 
accepted existence, as he had lived it with all about him, 
as a good thing. He had never questioned it, except 
when he read books; but then, they were only books, 
fairy stories of a fairer and impossible world. But now 
he had seen that world, possible and real, with a flower 
of a woman called Ruth in the midmost centre of it; and 
thenceforth he must know bitter tastes, and longings sharp 
as pain, and hopelessness that tantalized because it fed on 
hope. 

He had debated between the Berkeley Free Library and 
the Oakland Free Library, and decided upon the latter 
because Ruth lived in Oakland. Who could tell?—a 
library was a most likely place for her, and he might see 
her there. He did not know the way of libraries, and he 
wandered through endless rows of fiction, till the delicate- 
featured French-looking girl who seemed in charge, told 
him that the reference department was upstairs. He did 
not know enough to ask the man at the desk, and began 
his adventures in the philosophy alcove. He had heard 
of book philosophy, but had not imagined there had 
been so much written about it. The high, bulging shelves 
of heavy tomes humbled him and at the same time stimu- 
lated him. Here was work for the vigor of his brain. 
He found books on trigonometry in the mathematics sec- 
tion, and ran the pages, and stared at the meaningless 
formulas and figures. He could read English, but he saw 
there an alien speech. Norman and Arthur knew that 
speech. He had heard them talking it. And they were 
her brothers, He left the alcove in despair. From every 
side the books seemed to press upon him and crush him. 


44 MARTIN EDEN 


He had never dreamed that the fund of human knowledge 
bulked so big. He was frightened. How could his brain 
ever master it all? Later, he remembered that there 


\“ were other men, many men, who had mastered it ; and he 


breathed a great oath, passionately, under his breath, 
swearing that his brain could do what theirs had done. 

And so he wandered on, alternating between depression 
and elation as he stared at the shelves packed with wis- 
dom. In one miscellaneous section he came upon a “ Nor- 
rie’s Epitome.” He turned the pages reverently. Ina 
way, it spoke a kindred speech. Both he and it were of 
the sea. Then he found a *“ Bowditch” and books by 
Lecky and Marshall. There it was; he would teach him- 
self navigation. He would quit drinking, work up, and 
become a captain. Ruth seemed very near to him in that 
moment. As a captain, he could marry her (if she would 
have him). And if she wouldn’t, well—he would live a 
good life among men, because of Her, and he would quit 
drinking anyway. ‘Then he remembered the underwriters 
and the owners, the two masters a captain must serve, 
either of which could and would break him and whose in- 
terests were diametrically opposed. He cast his eyes 
about the room and closed the lids down on a vision of 
ten thousand books. No: no more of the sea for him. 
‘There was power in all that wealth of books, and if he 
* would do great things, he must do them on the land. Be- 
sides, captains were not allowed to take their wives to 
sea with them. 

Noon came, and afternoon. He forgot to eat, and 
sought on for the books on etiquette; for, in addition to 
career, his mind was vexed by a simple and very concrete 
problem: When you meet a young lady and she asks you to 
call, how soon can you call? was the way he worded it to 
himself. But when he found the right shelf, he sought 
vainly for the answer. He was appalled at the vast edifice 
of etiquette, and lost himself in the mazes of visiting-card 
conduct between persons in polite society. He abandoned 
his search. He had not found what he wanted, though 
he had found that it would take all of a man’s time to be 


MARTIN EDEN 45 


polite, and that he would have to live a preliminary life in 
which to learn how to be polite. 

“Did you find what you wanted?” the man at the desk 
asked him as he was leaving. 

“Yes, sir,” he answered. “You have a fine library 
here.”’ 

The man nodded. “We should be glad to see you 
here often. Are you a sailor?” 

“¢ Yes, sir,” he answered. ‘ And I'll come again.” 

Now, how did he know that? he asked himself as he 
went down the stairs. 

And for the first block along the street he walked very 
stiff and straight and awkwardly, until he forgot him- 
self in his thoughts, whereupon his rolling gait gracefully 
returned to him. 


CHAPTER VI 


A TERRIBLE restlessness that was akin to hunger afflicted 
Martin Eden. He was famished for a sight of the girl 
whose slender hands had gripped his life with a giant’s 
grasp. He could not steel himself to call upon her. He 
was afraid that he might call too soon, and so be guilty 
of an awful breach of that awful thing called etiquette. 
He spent long hours in the Oakland and Berkeley libraries, 
and made out application blanks for membership for him- 
self, his sisters Gertrude and Marian, and Jim, the latter’s 
consent being obtained at the expense of several glasses of 
beer. With four cards permitting him to draw books, he 
burned the gas late in the servant’s room, and was charged 
fifty cents a week for it by Mr. Higginbotham. 

The many books he read but served to whet his unrest. 
Every page of every book was a peep-hole into the realm 
of knowledge. His hunger fed upon what he read, and 
increased. Also, he did not know where to begin, and 
continually suffered from lack of preparation. The com- 
monest references, that he could see plainly every reader 
was expected to know, he did not know. And the same 
was true of the poetry he read which maddened him with 
delight. He read more of Swinburne than was contained 
in the volume Ruth had lent him; and * Dolores” he un- 
derstood thoroughly. But surely Ruth did not understand 
it, he concluded. How could she, living the refined life 
she did? Then he chanced upon Kipling’s poems, and 
was swept away by the lilt and swing and glamour with 
which familiar things had been invested. He wasamazed 
at the man’s sympathy with life and at his incisive psy- 
chology. Psychology was a new word in Martin’s vo- 
cabulary. He had bought a dictionary, which deed had 
decreased his supply of money and brought nearer the day 

46 


MARTIN EDEN 47 


on which he must sail in search of more. Also, it incensed 
Mr. Higginbotham, who would have preferred the money 
taking the form of board. 

He dared not go near Ruth’s neighborhood in the day- 
time, but night found him lurking like a thief around the 
Morse home, stealing glimpses at the windows and loving 
the very walls that sheltered her. Several times he barely 
escaped being caught by her brothers, and once he trailed 
Mr. Morse down town and studied his face in the lighted 
streets, longing all the while for some quick danger of 
death to threaten so that he might spring in and save her 
father. On another night, his vigil was rewarded by a 
glimpse of Ruth through a second-story window. He saw 
only her head and shoulders, and her arms raised as she 
fixed her hair before a mirror. It was only for a moment, 
but it was a long moment to him, during which his blood 
turned to wine and sang through his veins. Then she 
pulled down the shade. But it was her room —he had 
learned that; and thereafter he strayed there often, hiding 
under a dark tree on the opposite side of the street and 
smoking countless cigarettes. One afternoon he saw her 
mother coming out of a bank, and received another 
proof of the enormous distance that separated Ruth from 
him. She was of the class that dealt with banks. He had 
never been inside a bank in his life, and he had an idea 
that such institutions were frequented only by the very rich 
and the very powerful. 

In one way, he had undergone a moral revolution. Her | 
cleanness and purity had reacted upon him, and he felt in 
his being a crying need to be clean. He must be that if 
he were ever to be worthy of breathing the same air with 
her. He washed his teeth, and scrubbed his hands with a 
kitchen scrub-brush till he saw a nail-brush ina drug-store : 
window and divineditsuse. While purchasing it, the clerk 
glanced at his nails, suggested a nail-file, and so he became 
possessed of an additional toilet-tool. He ran across a 
book in the library on the care of the body, and promptly 
developed a penchant for a cold-water bath every morning, 

much to the amazement of Jim, and to the bewilderment 


48 MARTIN EDEN 


of Mr. Higginbotham, who was not in sympathy with such 
high-fangled notions and who seriously debated whether or 
not he should charge Martin extra for the water. Another 
stride was in the direction of creased trousers. Now that 
Martin was aroused in such matters, he swiftly noted the 
difference between the baggy knees of the trousers worn 
by the working class and the straight line from knee to 
foot of those worn by the men above the working class. 
Also, he learned the reason why, and invaded his sister’s 
kitchen in search of irons and ironing-board. He had 
misadventures at first, hopelessly burning one pair and buy- 
ing another, which expenditure again brought nearer the 
day on which he must put to sea. 

But the reform went deeper than mere outward appear- 
ance. He still smoked, but he drank no more. Up to 
that time, drinking had seemed to him the proper thing 
for men to do, and he had prided himself on his strong 
head which enabled him to drink most men under the 
table. Whenever he encountered a chance shipmate, and 
there were many in San Francisco, he treated them and 
was treated in turn, as of old, but he ordered for himself 
root beer or ginger ale and good-naturedly endured their 
chaffing. And as they waxed maudlin he studied them, 
_ watching the beast rise and master them and thanking 
“ God that he was no longer as they. They had their limi- 
tations to forget, and when they were drunk, their dim, 
stupid spirits were even as gods, and each ruled in his 
heaven of intoxicated desire. With Martin the need for 
strong drink had vanished. He was drunken in new and 
more profound ways — with Ruth, who had fired him with 
love and with a glimpse of higher and eternal life; with 
books, that had set a myriad maggots of desire gnawing in 
his brain ; and with the sense of personal cleanliness he was 
achieving, that gave him even more superb health than what 
he had enjoyed and that made his whole body sing with 
physical well-being. 

‘One night he went to the theatre, on the blind chance 
that he might see her there, and from the second balcony 
he did see her. He saw her come down the aisle, with 


MARTIN EDEN 49 


Arthur and a strange young man with a football mop of 
hair and eyeglasses, the sight of whom spurred him to in- 
stant apprehension and jealousy. He saw her take her 
seat in the orchestra circle, and little else than her did he 
see that night —a pair of slender white shoulders and a 
mass of pale gold hair, dim with distance. But there were 
others who saw, and now and again, glancing at those 
about him, he noted two young girls who looked back 
from the row in front, a dozen seats along, and who smiled 
at him with bold eyes. He had always been easy-going. 
It was not in his nature to give rebuff. In the old days 
he would have smiled back, and gone further and encour- 
aged smiling. But now it was different. He did smile 
back, then looked away, and looked no more deliberately. 
But several times, forgetting the existence of the two girls, 
his eyes caught their smiles. He could not re-thumb him- 


self in a day, nor could he violate the intrinsic kindliness , 


of his nature; so, at such moments, he smiled at the girls 
in warm human friendliness. It was nothing new to him. 
He knew they were reaching out their woman’s hands to 
him. But it was different now. Far down there in the 
orchestra circle was the one woman in all the world, so 
different, so terrifically different, from these two girls of 
his class, that he could feel for them only pity and sor- 
row. He had it in his heart to wish that they could pos- 
sess, in some small measure, her goodness and glory. And 
not for the world could he hurt them because of their out- 
reaching. He was not flattered by it; he even felt a slight 
shame at his lowliness that permitted it. He knew, did 
he belong in Ruth’s class, that there would be no over- 
tures from these girls; and with each glance of theirs he 
felt the fingers of his own class clutching at him to hold 
him down. 

He left his seat before the curtain went down on the 
last act, intent on seeing Her as she passed out. There 
were always numbers of men who stood on the sidewalk 
outside, and he could pull his cap down over his eyes and 
screen himself behind some one’s shoulder so that she 
should not see him. He emerged from the theatre with 

E 


< 


50 MARTIN EDEN 


the first of the crowd; but scarcely had he taken his posi- 
tion on the edge of the sidewalk when the two girls ap- 
peared. ‘They were looking for him, he knew; and for 
the moment he could have cursed that in him which drew 
women. Their casual edging across the sidewalk to the 
curb, as they drew near, apprised him of discovery. They 
slowed down, and were in the thick of the crowd as they 
came up with him. One of them brushed against him and 
apparently for the first time noticed him. She was a slen- 
der, dark girl, with black, defiant eyes. But they smiled 
at him, and he smiled back. 

“Hello,” he said. ; 

It was automatic; he had said it so often before under 
similar circumstances of first meetings. Besides, he could 
do no less. There was that large tolerance and sympathy 
in his nature that would permit him to do no less. The 
black-eyed girl smiled gratification and greeting, and 
showed signs of stopping, while her companion, arm 
linked in arm, giggled and likewise showed signs of 
halting. He thought quickly. It would never do for 
Her to come out and see him talking there with them. 
Quite naturally, as a matter of course, he swung in along- 
side the dark-eyed one and walked with her. There was 
no awkwardness on his part, no numb tongue. He was at 
home here, and he held his own royally in the badinage, 
bristling with slang and sharpness, that was always the 
preliminary to getting acquainted in these swift-moving 
affairs. At the corner where the main stream of people 
flowed onward, he started to edge out into the cross street. 
But the girl with the black eyes caught his arm, following 
him and dragging her companion after her, as she cried : — 

“Hold on, Bill! What’s yer rush? You're not goin’ to 
shake us so sudden as all that?” 

He halted with a laugh, and turned, facing them. 
Across their shoulders he could see the moving throng 
passing under the street lamps. Where he stood it was 
not so light, and, unseen, he would be able to see Her as 
she passed by. She would certainly pass by, for that way 
led home. 


MARTIN EDEN eI 


“ What’s her name?” he asked of the giggling girl, 
nodding at the dark-eyed one. 

“ You ask her,” was the convulsed response. 

“ Well, what is it ?” he demanded, turning squarely on 
the girl in question. 

“ You ain’t told me yours, yet,” she retorted. 

«You never asked it,” hesmiled. ‘ Besides, you guessed 
the first rattle. It’s Bill, all right, all right.” 

“ Aw, go long with you.” She looked him in the eyes, her 
own sharply passionate and inviting. “ Whatisit, honest?” 

Again she looked. All the centuries of woman since 
sex began were eloquent in her eyes. And he measured 
her in a careless way, and knew, bold now, that she would 
begin to retreat, coyly and delicately, as he pursued, ever 
ready to reverse the game should he turn faint-hearted. 
And, too, he was human, and could feel the draw of her, 
while his ego could not but appreciate the flattery of her 
kindness. Oh, he knew it all, and knew them well, from 
A to Z. Good, as goodness might be measured in their 
particular class, hard-working for meagre wages and 
scorning the sale of self for easier ways, nervously de- 
sirous for some small pinch of happiness in the desert 
of.existence, and facing a future that was a gamble be- 
tween the ugliness of unending toil and the black pit of 
more terrible wretchedness, the way whereto being briefer 
though better paid. 

« Bill,” he answered, nodding his head. ‘Sure, Pete, 
Bill an’ no other.” 

“No joshin’ ?” she queried. 

“It ain’t Bill at all,” the other broke in. 

“ How do you know?” he demanded. ‘“ You never laid 
eyes on me before.” 

‘*¢ No need to, to know you're lyin’,” was the retort. 

“ Straight, Bill, what is it?” the first girl asked. 

“ Bill’ll do,” he confessed. 

She reached out to his arm and shook him playfully. “I 
knew you was lyin’, but you look good to me just the same.” 

He captured the hand that invited, and felt on the palm 

familiar markings and distortions. 


“ 


ype 


LIBRARY ~~ 
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 


o2 : MARTIN EDEN 


“When’d you chuck the cannery?” he asked. 

“How'd yeh know?” and “ My, ain’t cheh a mind- 
reader!” the girls chorussed. 

And while he exchanged the stupidities of stupid minds 
with them, before his inner sight towered the book-shelves 
of the library, filled with the wisdom of the ages. He 
smiled bitterly at the incongruity of it, and was assailed 
by doubts. But between inner vision and outward pleas- 
antry he found time to watch the theatre crowd streaming 
by. And then he saw Her, under the lights, between her 
brother and the strange young man with glasses, and his 
heart seemed to stand still. He had waited long for this 
moment. He had time to note the light, fluffy something 
that hid her queenly head, the tasteful lines of her wrapped 
figure, the gracefulness of her carriage and of the hand that 
caught up her skirts; and then she was gone and he was 
left staring at the two girls of the cannery, at their tawdry 
attempts at prettiness of dress, their tragic efforts to be 
clean and trim, the cheap cloth, the cheap ribbons, and the 
cheap rings on the fingers. He felt a tug at his arm, and 
heard a voice saying: — 

“ Wake up, Bill! What’s the matter with you?” 

“ What was you sayin’?” he asked. 

“Oh, nothin’,” the dark girl answered, with a toss of 
her head. ‘I was only remarkin’ —” 

“What?” 

‘¢ Well, I was whisperin’ it’d be a good idea if you could 
dig up a gentleman friend — for her” (indicating her com- 
panion), “and then, we could go off an’ have ice-cream 
soda somewhere, or coffee, or anything.” 

He was afflicted by a sudden spiritual nausea. The 
transition from Ruth to this had been too abrupt. Ranged 
side by side with the bold, defiant eyes of the girl before 
him, he saw Ruth’s clear, luminous eyes, like a saint’s, 
gazing at him out of unplumbed depths of purity. And, 
somehow, he felt within him a stir of power. He was 
better than this. Life meant more to him than it meant 
to these two girls whose thoughts did not go beyond ice- 
cream and a gentleman friend. He remembered that he 


MARTIN EDEN 53 


had led always a secret life in his thoughts. These 
thoughts he had tried to share, but never had he found 
a woman capable of understanding —nora man. He had 
tried, at times, but had only puzzled his listeners. And 
as his thoughts had been beyond them, so, he argued now,. 
he must be beyond them. He felt power move in him, 
and clenched his fists. Jf life meant more to him, then it 


was for him to demand more from life, but he could not y 


demand it from such companionship as this. Those bold 
black eyes had nothing to offer. He knew the thoughts 
behind them — of ice-cream and of something else. But 
those saint’s eyes alongside—they offered all he knew and 
more than he could guess. They offered books and paint- 
ing, beauty and repose, and all the fine elegance of higher 
existence. Behind those black eyes he knew every thought 
process. It was like clockwork. He could watch every 
wheel go around. ‘Their bid was low pleasure, narrow as 
the grave, that palled, and the grave was at the end of it. 
But the bid of the saint’s eyes was mystery, and wonder 
unthinkable, and eternal life. He had caught glimpses of 
the soul in them, and glimpses of his own soul, too. 

“'There’s only one thing wrong with the programme,” he 
said aloud. “I’ve got a date already.” 

The girl’s eyes blazed her disappointment. 

“To sit up with a sick friend, I suppose?” she sneered. 

“No, a real, honest date with—” he faltered, ‘“‘ with 
a girl.’’ 

‘ You’re not stringin’ me? ” she asked earnestly. 

He looked her in the eyes and answered : “ It’s straight, 
allright. But why can’t we meet some other time? You 
ain’t told me your name yet. An’ where d’ye live?”’ 

“ Lizzie,” she replied, softening toward him, her hand 
pressing his arm, while her body leaned against his. “ Liz- 
zie Connolly. And I live at Fifth an’ Market.” 

He talked on a few minutes before saying good night. 
He did not go home immediately; and under the tree 
where he kept his vigils he looked up at a window and 
murmured: “That date was with you, Ruth. I kept it 
for you.” 


CHAPTER VII 


A WEEK of heavy reading had passed since the evening 
he first met Ruth Morse, and still he dared not call. ‘ime 
and again he nerved himself up to call, but under the 
doubts that assailed him his determination died away. He 
did not know the proper time to call, nor was there any 
one to tell him, and he was afraid of committing himself to 
an irretrievable blunder. Having shaken himself free from 
his old companions and old ways of life, and having no 
new companions, nothing remained for him but to read, 
and the long hours he devoted to it would have ruined a 


\, dozen pairs of ordinary eyes. But his eyes were strong, 


and they were backed by a body superbly strong. Further- 
more, his mind was fallow. It had lain fallow all his life 
so far as the abstract thought of the books was concerned, 
and it was ripe for the sowing. It had never been jaded 
by study, and it bit hold of the knowledge in the books 
with sharp teeth that would not let go. 

It seemed to-him, by the end of the week, that he had 
lived centuries, so far behind were the old life and outlook. 
But he was baffled by lack of preparation. He attempted 
to read books that required years of preliminary speciali- 
zation. One day he would read a book of antiquated 
philosophy, and the next day one that was ultra-modern, 
so that his head would be whirling with the conflict and 
contradiction of ideas. It was the same with the econo- 
mists. On the one shelf at the library he found Karl 
Marx, Ricardo, Adam Smith, and Mill, and the abstruse 
formulas of the one gave no clew that the ideas of another 
were obsolete. He was bewildered, and yet he wanted to 
know. He had become interested, in a day, in economics, 
industry, and politics. Passing through the City Hall 
Park, he had noticed a group of men, in the centre of 

54 


MARTIN EDEN a5) 


which were half a dozen, with flushed faces and raised 
voices, earnestly carrying on a discussion. He joined the 
listeners, and heard a new, alien tongue in the mouths of 
the philosophers ofthe people. One was a tramp, another 
was a labor agitator, a third was a law-school student, and 
the remainder was composed of wordy workingmen. For 
the first time he heard of socialism, anarchism, and single 
tax, and learned that there were warring social philoso- 
phies. He heard hundreds of technical words that were 
new to him, belonging to fields of thought that his meagre 
reading had never touched upon. Because of this he 
could not follow the arguments closely, and he could only 
guess at and surmise the ideas wrapped up in such strange 
expressions. Then there was a black-eyed restaurant 
waiter who was a theosophist, a union baker who was an 
agnostic, an old man who baffled all of them with the 
strange philosophy that what is 7s right, and another old 
man who discoursed interminably about the cosmos and 
the father-atom and the mother-atom. 

Martin Eden’s head was in astate of addlement when he 
went away after several hours, and he hurried to the library 
to look up the definitions ofa dozen unusual words. And 
when he left the library, he carried under his arm four vol- 
umes: Madam Blavatsky’s “Secret Doctrine,” “ Progress 
and Poverty,” The Quintessence of Socialism,” and“ War- 
fare of Religion and Science.” Unfortunately, he began 
on the “Secret Doctrine.” Every line bristled with many- 
sylabled words he did not understand. He sat up in bed, 
and the dictionary was in front of him more often than the 
book. He looked up so many new words that when they 
recurred, he had forgotten their meaning and had to look 
them up again. He devised the plan of| writing the defi- 
nitions in a note-book, and filled page after page with 
them. And still he could not understand. He read until 
three in the morning, and his brain was in a turmoil, but 
not one essential thought in the text had he grasped. He 
looked up, and it seemed that the room was lifting, heel- 
ing, and plunging like a ship upon the sea. Then he 
hurled the “Secret Doctrine” and many curses across the 


06 MARTIN EDEN 


room, turned off the gas, and composed himself to sleep. 
Nor did he have much better luck with the other three 
books. It was not that his brain was weak or incapable; 
it could think these thoughts were it not for lack of train- 
ing in thinking and lack of the thought-tools with which 
to think. He guessed this, and for a while entertained 
the idea of reading nothing but the dictionary until he had 
mastered every word in it. 

Poetry, however, was his solace, and he read much of it, 
finding his greatest joy in the simpler poets, who were more 
understandable. He loved beauty, and there he found 
beauty. Poetry, like music, stirred him profoundly, and, 
though he did not know it, he was preparing his mind for 
the heavier work that was to come. ‘The pages of his 
mind were blank, and, without effort, much he read and 
liked, stanza by stanza, was impressed upon those pages, so 
that he was soon able to extract great joy from chanting 
aloud or under his breath the music and the beauty of the 
printed words he had read. Then he stumbled upon 
Gayley’s “ Classic Myths” and Bulfinch’s “Age of Fable,” 
side by side on a library shelf. It was illumination, a 
great light in the darkness of his ignorance, and he read 
poetry more avidly than ever. 

The man at the desk in the library had seen Martin 
there so often that he had become quite cordial, always 
ereeting him with a smile and anod when he entered. It 
was because of this that Martin did a daring thing. 
Drawing out some books at the desk, and while the man 
was stamping the cards, Martin blurted out: — 

“Say, there’s something I’d like to ask you.” 

The man smiled and paid attention. 

“When you meet a young lady an’ she asks you to call, 
how soon can you call?” 

Martin felt his shirt press and cling to his shoulders, 
what of the sweat of the effort. 

“Why Id say any time,” the man answered. 

“Yes, but this is different,” Martin objected. ‘“She—TI 
— well, you see, it’s this way: maybe she won’t be there. 
She goes to the university.” 


MARTIN EDEN 57 


“Then call again.’ 

“What I said ain’t what I meant,” Martin confessed 
falteringly, while he made up his mind to throw himself 
wholly upon the other’s mercy. “I’m just a rough sort 
of a fellow, an’ I ain’t never seen anything of society. 
This girl is all that I ain’t, an’ I ain’t anything that she 
is. You don’t think ’m playin’ the fool, do you?” he 
demanded abruptly. 

‘No, no; not at all, I assure you,” the other protested. 
“« Your request is not exactly in the scope of the reference 
department, but I shall be only too pleased to assist you.” 

Martin looked at him admiringly. 

“Tf I could tear it off that way, I'd be all right,” he said. 

“T beg pardon ?” 

“ T mean if I could talk easy that way, an’ polite, an’ all 
the rest.” 

“ Oh,” said the other, with comprehension. 

“What isthe best time to call? The afternoon ? — not 
too close to meal-time? Or theevening ? Or Sunday?” 

“Pll tell you,” the librarian said with a brightening 
face. ‘“ You call her up on the telephone and find out.” 

“ Tl] do it,” he said, picking up his books and starting 
away. 

He turned back and asked: — 

‘When you’re speakin’ to a young lady— say, for in- 
stance, Miss Lizzie Smith— do you say ‘ Miss Lizzie’? or 
‘Miss Smith’ ?” 

“Say ‘Miss Smith,’” the librarian stated authorita- 
tively. ‘Say ‘Miss Smith’ always — until you come to 
know her better.” 

So it was that Martin Eden solved the problem. 

“Come down any time; Ill be at home all afternoon,” 
was Ruth’s reply over the telephone to his stammered 
request as to when he could return the borrowed books. 

She met him at the door herself, and her woman’s eyes 
took in immediately the creased trousers and the certain 
slight but indefinable change in him for the better. Also, 
she was struck by his face. It was almost violent, this 
health of his, and it seemed to rush out of him and at her in 


58 MARTIN EDEN 


waves of force. She felt the urge again of the desire to 
lean toward him for warmth, and marvelled again at the 
effect his presence produced upon her. And he, in turn, 
knew again the swimming sensation of bliss when he felt 
the contact of her hand in greeting. The difference be- 
tween them lay in that she was cool and self-possessed 
while his face flushed to the roots of the hair. He stum- 
bled with his old awkwardness after her, and his shoulders 
swung and lurched perilously. 

Once they were seated in the living-room, he began to 
get on easily — more easily by far than he had expected. 
She made it easy for him; and the gracious spirit with 
which she did it made him love her more madly than ever. 
They talked first of the borrowed books, of the Swinburne 
he was devoted to, and of the Browning he did not under- 
stand; and she led the conversation on from subject to 
subject, while she pondered the problem of how she could 
be of help to him. She had thought of this often since 
their first meeting. She wanted to help him. He made 
a call upon her pity and tenderness that no one had ever 
made before, and the pity was not so much derogatory of 
him as maternal in her. Her pity could not be of the 
common sort, when the man who drew it was so much 
man as to shock her with maidenly fears and set her mind 
and pulse thrilling with strange thoughts and feelings. 
The old fascination of his neck was there, and there was 
sweetness in the thought of laying her hands upon it. It 
seemed still a wanton impulse, but she had grown more 
used to it. She did not dream that in such guise new- 
born love would epitomize itself. Nor did she dream that 
the feeling he excited in her was love. She thought she 
was merely interested in him as an unusual type possess- 
ing various potential excellencies, and she even felt phil- 
anthropic about it. 

She did not know she desired him ; but with him it was 
different. He knew that he loved her, and he desired her 
as he had never before desired anything in his life. He 
had loved poetry for beauty’s sake ; but since he met her 
the gates to the vast field of love-poetry had been opened 


MARTIN EDEN 59 


wide. She had given him understanding even more than 
Bulfinch and Gayley. There was a line that a week be- 
fore he would not have favored with a second thought — 
*¢ God’s own mad lover dying on a kiss”; but now it was 
ever insistent in his mind. He marvelled at the wonder 
of it and the truth; and as he gazed upon her he knew 
that he could die gladly upon a kiss. He felt himself 
God’s own mad lover, and no accolade of knighthood 
could have given him greater pride. And at last he 
knew the meaning of life and why he had been born. 
As he gazed at her and listened, his thoughts grew 
daring. He reviewed all the wild delight of the pressure 
of her hand in his at the door, and longed for it again. 
His gaze wandered often toward her lips, and he yearned 
for them hungrily. But there was nothing gross or 
earthly about this yearning. It gave him exquisite delight 
to watch every movement and play of those lips as they 
enunciated the words she spoke; yet they were not ordi- 
nary lips such as all men and women had. Their sub- 
stance was not mere human clay. ‘They were lips of 
pure spirit, and his desire for them seemed absolutely 
different from the desire that had led him to other women’s 
lips. He could kiss her lips, rest his own physical lips 
upon them, but it would be with the lofty and awful 
fervor with which one would kiss the robe of God. He 
was not conscious of this transvaluation of values that had 
taken place in him, and was unaware that the light that 
shone in his eyes when he looked at her was quite the 
same light that shines in all men’s eyes when the desire of 
love is upon them. He did not dream how ardent and 
masculine his gaze was, nor that the warm flame of it was 
affecting the alchemy of her spirit. Her penetrative vir- 
ginity exalted and disguised his own emotions, elevating his 
thoughts to a star-cool chastity, and he would have been 
startled to learn that there was that shining out of his 
eyes, like warm waves, that flowed through her and kin- 
dled a kindred warmth. She was subtly perturbed by it, 
and more than once, though she knew not why, it disrupted 
her train of thought with its delicious intrusion and com- 


60 ‘ MARTIN EDEN 


pelled her to grope for the remainder of ideas partly 
uttered. Speech was always easy with her, and these 
interruptions would have puzzled her had she not decided 
that it was because he was a remarkable type. She was 
very sensitive to impressions, and it was not strange, after 
all, that this aura of a traveller from another world should 
so affect her. 

The problem in the background of her consciousness was 
how to help him, and she turned the conversation in that 
direction; but it was Martin who came to the point first. 

“I wonder if I can get some advice from you,” he began, 
and received an acquiescence of willingness that made his 
heart bound. ‘You remember the other time I was here 
I said I couldn’t talk about books an’ things because I 
didn’t know how? Well, I’ve ben doin’ a lot of thinkin’ 
ever since. I’ve ben to the library a whole lot, but most 
of the books I’ve tackled have ben over my head. Mebbe 
I'd better begin at the beginnin’. I ain’t never had no 
advantages. I’ve worked pretty hard ever since I was a 
kid, an’ since I’ve ben to the library, lookin’ with new eyes 
at books — an’ lookin’ at new books, too — I’ve just about 
concluded that I ain’t ben reading the right kind. You 
know the books you find in cattle-camps an’ fo’c’s’ls ain’t 
the same you've got in this house, for instance. Well, 
that’s the sort of readin’ matter I’ve ben accustomed to. 
And yet —an’ I ain’t just makin’ a brag of it— I’ve ben 
different from the people I’ve herded with. Not that I’m 
any better than the sailors an’ cow-punchers I travelled 
with, — I was cow-punchin’ for a short time, you know, — 
but I always liked books, read everything I could lay hands 
on, an’ — well, I guess I think differently from most of ’em. 

*“ Now, to come to what I’m drivin’ at. I was never 
inside a house like this. When I come a week ago, an’ 
saw all this, an’ you, an’ your mother, an’ brothers, an’ 
everything — well, [ liked it. Id heard about such things 
an’ read about such things in some of the books, an’ when 
I looked around at your house, why, the books come true. 
But the thing I’m after is I liked it. I wanted it. I 
want it now. I want to breathe air like you get in this 


MARTIN EDEN 61 


house —air that is filled with books, and pictures, and 
beautiful things, where people talk in low voices an’ are 
clean, an’ their thoughts are clean. The air I always 
breathed was mixed up with grub an’ house-rent an’ 
scrappin’ an booze an’ that’s all they talked about, too. 
Why, when you was crossin’ the room to kiss your mother, 
I thought it was the most beautiful thing I ever seen. 
lve seen a whole lot of life, an’ somehow I’ve seen a 
whole lot more of it than most of them that was with me. 
I like to see, an’ I want to see more, an’ I want to see it 
different. 

“ But I ain’t got to the point yet. Here itis. I want 
to make my way to the kind of life you have in this house. 
There’s more in life than booze, an’ hard work, an’ 
knockin’ about. Now, how am I goin’ to get it? Where 
do I take hold an’ begin? Dm willin’ to work my passage, 
you know, an’ I: can make most men sick when it comes 
to hard work. Once I get started, Pll work night an’ 
day. Mebbe you think it’s funny, me askin’ you about all 
this. I know you're the last person in the world I ought 
to ask, but I don’t know anybody else I could ask — unless 
it’s Arthur. Mebbe I oughttoaskhim. IfI was—” 

His voice died away. His firmly planned intention had 
come to a halt on the verge of the horrible probability that 
he should have asked Arthur and that he had made a fool 
of himself. Ruth did not speak immediately. She was 
too absorbed in striving to reconcile the stumbling, un- 
couth speech and its simplicity of thought with what she 
saw in his face. She had never looked in eyes that ex- 


pressed greater power. Here was a man who could do,,’ 


anything, was the message she read there, and it accorded’ 
ill with the weakness of his spoken thought. And for that 
matter so complex and quick was her own mind that she 
did not have a just appreciation of simplicity. And yet 
she had caught an impression of power in the very grop- 
ing of thismind. It had seemed to her like a giant writh- 
ing and straining at the bonds that held him down. Her 
face was all sympathy when she did speak. 

*“ What you need, you realize yourself, and it is educa- 


62 MARTIN EDEN 


tion. You should go back and finish grammar school, and 
then go through the high school and university.” 

“ But that takes money,” he interrupted. 

“Oh!” she cried. “I had not thought of that. But 
then you have relatives, somebody who could assist you?” 

He shook his head. 

‘My father and mother are dead. I’ve two sisters, one 
married, an’ the other’ll get married soon, I suppose. 
Then I’ve a string of brothers, —I’m the youngest, — but 
they never helped nobody. ‘They’ve just knocked around 
over the world, lookin’ out for number one. The oldest 
died in India. Two arein South Africa now, an’ another’s 
on a whaling voyage, an’ one’s travellin’ with a circus — 
he does trapeze work. An’ I guess [’m just like them. 
I’ve taken care of myself since I was eleven — that’s when 
my mother died. Tve got to study by myself, I guess, 
an’ what I want to know is where to begin.” 

“I should say the first thing of all would be to get 


a grammar. Your grammar is—” She had intended 
saying “awful,” but she amended it to “is not particu- 
larly good.” 


He flushed and sweated. 

“T know I must talk a lot of slang an’ words you don’t 
understand. But then they’re the only words I know 
—how to speak. I’ve got other words in my mind, 
picked ’em up from books, but I can’t pronounce ’em, so 
I don’t use ’em.” 

“Jt isn’t what you say, so much as how you say it. 
You don’t mind my being frank, do you? I don’t want 
to hurt you.” 

“No, no,” he cried, while he secretly blessed her for 
her kindness. “Fire away. I’ve got to know, an’ I'd 
sooner know from you than anybody else.” 

“Well, then, you say, ‘You was’; it should be, ‘You 
were.’ You say ‘I seen’ for ‘I saw.’ You use the double 
negative —”’ 

“ What’s the double negative?” he demanded; then 
added humbly, “You see, I don’t even understand your 
explanations.” 


MARTIN EDEN 63 


“Tm afraid I didn’t explain that,” she smiled. “A 
double negative is—let me see—vwell, you say, ‘never 
helped nobody.’ ‘Never’ is a negative. ‘Nobody’ is 
another negative. It is a rule that two negatives make 
a positive. ‘Never helped nobody’ means that, not help- 
ing nobody, they must have helped somebody.” 

“That’s pretty clear,” he said. “I never thought of 
it before. But it don’t mean they must have helped 
somebody, does it? Seems to me that ‘never helped 
nobody’ just naturally fails to say whether or not they 
helped somebody. I never thought of it before, and Vl 
never say it again.” 

She was pleased and surprised with the quickness and 
surety of his mind. As soon as he had got the clew he 
not only understood but corrected her error. 

“You'll find it all in the grammar,” she went on. 
“ There’s something else I noticed in your speech. You 
say ‘don’t’ when you shouldn’t. ‘Don’t’ is a contraction 
and stands for two words. Do you know them?” 

He thought a moment, then answered, “* Do not.’ ” 

She nodded her head, and said, “ And you use ‘don’t’ 
when you mean ‘does not.’ ” 

He was puzzled over this, and did not get it so quickly. 

“Give me an illustration,” he asked. 

*“ Well—” She puckered her brows and pursed up 
her mouth as she thought, while he looked on and decided 
that her expression was most adorable. ‘“ ‘It don’t do to 
be hasty.’ Change ‘don’t’ to ‘do not,’ and it reads, ‘ It 
do not do to be hasty,’ which is perfectly absurd.” 

He turned it over in his mind and considered. 

* Doesn’t it jar on your ear?” she suggested. 

“ Can’t say that it does,” he replied judicially. 

“Why didn’t you say, ‘Can’t say that it do’?” she 
queried. 

“That sounds wrong,” he said slowly. ‘As for the 
other I can’t make up my mind. I guess my ear ain’t 
had the trainin’ yours has.” 

‘‘ There is no such word as ‘ain’t, 
emphatic. 


bry) 


she said, prettily 


64 MARTIN EDEN 


Martin flushed again. 

“And you say ‘ben’ for ‘been,’”’ she continued; “ ‘I 
come’ for ‘I came’; and the way you chop your endings 
is something dreadful.” 

“ How do youmean?” He leaned forward, feeling that 
he ought to get down on his knees before so marvellous a 
mind. ‘ How do I chop?” | 

“You don’t complete the endings. ‘A-n-d’ spells 
‘and.’ You pronounce it ‘an’.’ ‘I-n-g’ spells ‘ing.’ 
Sometimes you pronounce it ‘ing’ and sometimes you 
leave off the ‘g.’ And then you slur by dropping initial 
letters and diphthongs. ‘'T-h-e-m’ spells ‘them.’ You 
pronounce it—oh, well, it is not necessary to go over 
all of them. What you need is the grammar. [ll get 
one and show you how to begin.”’ 

As she arose, there shot through his mind something 
that he had read in the etiquette books, and he stood 
up awkwardly, worrying as to whether he was doing the 
right thing, and fearing that she might take it as a sign 
that he was about to go. 

“ By the way, Mr. Eden,” she called back, as she was 
leaving the room. ‘ What is booze? You used it several 
times, you know.” 

“Oh, booze,” he laughed. “It’s slang. It means whis- 
key an’ beer — anything that will make you drunk.” 

“« And another thing,” she laughed back. ‘Don’t use 
‘you’ when you are impersonal. ‘ You’ is very personal, 
and your use of it just now was not precisely what you 
meant.” 

“T don’t just see that.” 

“Why, you said just now, to me, ‘whiskey and beer — 
anything that will make you drunk’—make me drunk, 
don’t you see?” 

‘¢ Well, it would, wouldn’t it?” 

“ Yes, of course,” she smiled. ‘ But it would be nicer 
‘not to bring me into it. Substitute ‘one’ for ‘you’ and 
see how much better it sounds.” 

When she returned with the grammar, she drew a chair 
near his — he wondered if he should have helped her with 


MARTIN EDEN 65 


the chair —and sat down beside him. She turned the 
pagts of the grammar, and their heads were inclined 
tov..rd each other. He could hardly follow her outlin- 
ing|of the work he must do, so amazed was he by her 
de,ezhtful propinquity. But when she began to lay down 
tl,dimportance of conjugation, he forgot all about her. 
- Tinrhad never heard of conjugation, and was fascinated 
by the glimpse he was catching into the tie-ribs of lan- 
guage. He leaned closer to the page, and her hair touched 
his cheek. He had fainted but once in his life, and he 
thought he was going to faint again. He could scarcely 
breathe, and his heart was pounding the blood up into his 
throat and suffocating him. Never had she seemed so 
accessible as now. For the moment the great gulf that 
separated them was bridged. But there was no diminu- 
tion in the loftiness of his feeling for her. She had not 
descended to him. It was he who had been caught up 
into the clouds and carried to her. His reverence for 
her, in that moment, was of the same order as religious 
awe and fervor. It seemed to him that he had intruded 
upon the holy of holies, and slowly and carefully he moved 
his head aside from the contact which thrilled him like 
an electric shock and of which she had not been aware. 


CHAPTER VIII 


SEVERAL weeks went by, during which Martin Kuen 
studied his grammar, reviewed the books on etiquette, and 
read voraciously the books that caught his fancy. Of his 
own class he saw nothing. The girls of the Lotus Club 
wondered what had become of him and worried Jim 
with questions, and some of the fellows who put on the 
glove at Riley’s were glad that Martin cameno more. He 
made another discovery of treasure-trove in the library. 
As the grammar had shown him the tie-ribs of language, 
so that book showed him the tie-ribs of poetry, and he 
began to learn metre and construction and form, beneath 
the beauty he loved finding the why and wherefore 
of that beauty. Another modern book he found treated 
poetry as a representative art, treated it exhaustively, 
with copious illustrations from the best in literature. 
Never had he read fiction with so keen zest as he 
studied these books. And his fresh mind, untaxed for _ 
twenty years and impelled by maturity of desire, gripped 
hold of what he read with a virility unusual to the student 
mind. 

When he looked back now from his vantage-ground, 
the old world he had known, the world of land and sea 
and ships, of sailor-men and harpy-women, seemed a very 
small world; and yet it blended in with this new world 
and expanded. His mind made for unity, and he was 
surprised when at first he began to see points of contact 
between the two worlds. And he was ennobled, as well, 
by the loftiness of thought and beauty he found in the 
books. This led him to believe more firmly than ever that 
up above him, in society like Ruth and her family, all 
men and women thought these thoughts and lived them. 
Down below where he lived was the ignoble, and he 

66 


MARTIN EDEN 67 


wanted to purge himself of the ignoble that had soiled 
all his days, and to rise to that sublimated realm where 
dwelt the upper classes. All his childhood and youth 
had been troubled by a vague unrest; he had never known 
what he wanted, but he had wanted something that he 
had hunted vainly for until he met Ruth. And now his 
unrest had become sharp and painful, and he knew at last, 
clearly and definitely, that it was beauty, and intellect, \ 
and love that he must have. 

During those several weeks he saw Ruth half a dozen 
times, and each time was an added inspiration. She 
helped him with his English, corrected his pronunciation, 
and started him on arithmetic. But their intercourse 
was not all devoted to elementary study. He had seen 
too much of life, and his mind was too matured, to be 
wholly content with fractions, cube root, parsing, and 
analysis; and there were times when their conversation 
turned on other themes — the last poetry he had read, the 
latest poet she had studied. And when she read aloud to 
him her favorite passages, he ascended to the topmost 
heaven of delight. Never, in all the women he had heard 
speak, had he heard a voice ike hers. The least sound of 
it was a stimulus to his love, and he thrilled and throbbed 
with every word she uttered. It was the quality of it, 
the repose, and the musical modulation — the soft, rich, 
indefinable product of culture and a gentle soul. As he 
listened to her, there rang in the ears of his memory the 
_harsh cries of barbarian women and of hags, and, in 
lesser degrees of harshness, the strident voices of work- 
ing women and of the girls of his own class. Then 
the chemistry of vision would begin to work, and they 
would troop in review across his mind, each, by con- 
trast, multiplying Ruth’s glories. Then, too, his bliss 
was heightened by the knowledge that her mind was com- 
prehending what she read and was quivering with appre- 
ciation of the beauty of the written thought. She read to 
him much from “ The Princess,” and often he saw her eyes 
swimming with tears, so finely was her esthetic nature 
strung. At such moments her own emotions elevated 
him till he was as a god, and, as he gazed at her and 


68 MARTIN EDEN 


listened, he seemed gazing on the face of life and reading 
its deepest secrets. And then, becoming aware of the 
heights of exquisite sensibility he attained, he decided 
that this was love and that love was the greatest thing 
_ in the world. And in review would pass along the 

corridors of memory all previous thrills and burnings 
he had known, — the drunkenness of wine, the caresses of 
women, the rough play and give and take of physical 
contests, — and they seemed trivial and mean compared 
with this sublime ardor he now enjoyed. 

The situation was obscured to Ruth. She had never 
had any experiences of the heart. Her only experiences 
in such matters were of the books, where the facts of 
ordinary day were translated by fancy into a fairy realm 
of unreality; and she little knew that this rough sailor 
was creeping into her heart and storing there pent forces 
that would some day burst forth and surge through her 
in waves of fire. She did not know the actual fire of love. 
Her knowledge of love was purely theoretical, and she 
conceived of it as lambent flame, gentle as the fall of dew 
or the ripple of quiet water, and cool as the velvet-dark 
of summer nights. Her idea of love was more that of 
placid affection, serving the loved one softly in an at- 
mosphere, flower-scented and dim-lighted, of ethereal calm. 
She did not dream of the volcanic convulsions of love, its 
scorching heat and sterile wastes of parched ashes. She 
knew neither her own potencies, nor the potencies of the 
world; and the deeps of life were to her seas of illusion. 
The conjugal affection of her father and mother consti- 
tuted her ideal of love-affinity, and she looked forward 
some day to emerging, without shock or friction, into that 
same quiet sweetness of existence with a loved one. 

So it was that she looked upon Martin Eden as a 
novelty, a strange individual, and she identified with 
novelty and strangeness the effects he produced upon her. 
It was only natural. In similar ways she had experienced 
unusual feelings when she looked at wild animals in the 
menagerie, or when she witnessed a storm of wind, or 
shuddered at the bright-ribbed lightning. There was 


MARTIN EDEN 69 


something cosmic in such things, and there was something 
cosmic in him. He came to her breathing of large airs 
and great spaces. ‘The blaze of tropic suns was in his 


face, and in his swelling, resilient muscles was the pri- »” 


mordial vigor of life. He was marred and scarred by that 
mysterious world of rough men and rougher deeds, the 
outposts of which began beyond her horizon. He was 
untamed, wild, and in secret ways her vanity was touched 
by the fact that he came so mildly to her hand. Likewise 
she was stirred by the common impulse to tame the wild 
thing. It was an unconscious impulse, and farthest from 
her thoughts that her desire was to re-thumb the clay of 
him into a likeness of her father’s image, which image she 
believed to be the finest in the world. Nor was there any 
way, out of her inexperience, for her to know that the 
cosmic feel she caught of him was that most cosmic of 
things, love, which with equal power drew men and women 
together across the world, compelled stags to kill each 
other in the rutting season, and drove even the elements 
irresistibly to unite. 

His swift development was a source of surprise and 
interest. She detected unguessed finenesses in him that 
seemed to bud, day by day, like flowers in congenial soil. 
She read Browning aloud to him, and was often puzzled 
by the strange interpretations he gave to mooted passages. 
It was beyond her to realize that, out of his experience of 
men and women and life, his interpretations were far more 
frequently correct than hers. His conceptions seemed 
naive to her, though she was often fired by his daring 
flights of comprehension, whose orbit-path was so wide 
among the stars that she could not follow and could only 
sit and thrill to the impact of unguessed power. Then 
she played to him —no longer at him—and probed him 
with music that sank to depths beyond her plumb-line. 
His nature opened to music as a flower to the sun, and the 
transition was quick from his working-class rag-time and 
jingles to her classical display pieces that she knew nearly 
by heart. Yet he betrayed a democratic fondness for 
Wagener, and the “ Tannhiuser” overture, when she had 


70 MARTIN EDEN 


given him the clew to it, claimed him as nothing else she 
played. In an immediate way it personified his life. All 
his past was the Venusburg motif, while her he identified 
somehow with the Pilgrim's Chorus motif; and from the 
exalted state this elevated him to, he swept onward and 
upward into that vast shadow-realm of spirit-groping, 
where good and evil war eternally. 

Sometimes he questioned, and induced in her mind 
temporary doubts as to the correctness of her own defini- 
tions and conceptions of music. But her singing he did 
not question. It was too wholly her, and he sat always 
amazed at the divine melody of her pure soprano voice. 
And he could not help but contrast it with the weak pip- 
ings and shrill quaverings of factory girls, ill-nourished 
and untrained, and with the raucous shriekings from gin- 
cracked throats of the women of the seaport towns. She 
enjoyed singing and playing to him. In truth, it was the 
first time she had ever had a human soul to play with, 
and the plastic clay of him was a delight to mould; for 
she thought she was moulding it, and her intentions were 
good. Besides, it was pleasant to be with him. He did 
not repel her. That first repulsion had been really a fear 
of her undiscovered self, and the fear had gone to sleep. 
Though she did not know it, she had a feeling in him of 
proprietary right. Also, he had a tonic effect upon her. 
She was studying hard at the university, and it seemed 
to strengthen her to emerge from the dusty books and 
have the fresh sea-breeze of his personality blow upon her. 
Strength! Strength was what she needed, and he gave it 
to her in generous measure. ‘To come into the same room 
with him, or to meet him at the door, was to take heart of 
life. And when he had gone, she would return to her 
books with a keener zest and fresh store of energy. 

She knew her Browning, but it had never sunk into 
her that it was an awkward thing to play with souls. As 
her interest in Martin increased, the remodelling of his life 
became a passion with her. 

“There is Mr. Butler,” she said one afternoon, when 
grammar and arithmetic and poetry had been put aside. 


MARTIN EDEN 71 


“He had comparatively no advantages. at first. His 
father had been a bank cashier, but he lingered for years, 
dying of consumption in Arizona, so that when he was 
dead, Mr. Butler, Charles Butler he was called, found 
himself alone in the world. His father had come from 
Australia, you know, and so he had no relatives in Cali- 
fornia. He went to work in a printing-office, —I have\ 


heard him tell of it many times, — and he got three dollars \ |, 
a week, at first. His income to-day is at least thirty ~ \~ 


thousand a year. How did he do it? He was honest, 
and faithful, and industrious, and economical. He denied » 
himself the enjoyments that most boys indulge in. He 
made it a point to save so much every week, no matter 
what he had to do without in order to save it. Of course, 
he was soon earning more than three dollars a week, and 
as his wages increased he saved more and more. 

“He worked in the daytime, and at night he went to 

night school. He had his eyes fixed always on the future. 
Later on he went to night high school. When he was 
only seventeen, he was earning excellent wages at setting 
type, but he was ambitious. He wanted a career, not a 
livelihood, and he was content to make immediate sacri- 
fices for his ultimate again. He decided upon the law, 
and he entered father’s office as an office boy — think of 
that! —and got only four dollars a week. But he had 
learned how to be economical, and out of that four dollars 
he went on saving money.” 
_ She paused for breath, and to note how Martin was re- 
ceiving it. His face was lighted up with interest in the 
youthful struggles of Mr. Butler; but there was a frown 
upon his face as well. 

“T’d say they was pretty hard lines for a young fellow,” 
he remarked. ‘Four dollars a week! How could he live 
onit? You can bet he didn’t have any frills. Why, I pay 
five dollars a week for board now, an’ there’s nothin’ 
excitin’ about it, you can lay tothat. He must have lived 
like a dog. The food he ate—” 

“He cooked for himself,” she interrupted, “on a little 
kerosene stove.” 


72 MARTIN EDEN 


“The food he ate must have been worse than what a 
sailor gets on the worst-feedin’ deep-water ships, than 
which there ain’t much that can be possibly worse.” 

“ But think of him now!” she cried enthusiastically. 
“Think of what his income affords him. His early 

denials are paid for a thousand-fold.” 
Martin looked at her sharply. 

“ There’s one thing I’ll bet you,” he said, ‘‘and it is 
that Mr. Butler is nothin’ gay-hearted now in his fat days. 
He fed himself like that for years an’ years, on a boy’s 
stomach, an’ I bet his stomach’s none too good now for 
it, | 

Her eyes dropped before his searching gaze. 

“Tl bet he’s got dyspepsia right now!” Martin chal- 
lenged. 

‘Yes, he has,” she confessed; ** but —”’ 

‘An’ I bet,” Martin dashed on, “that he’s solemn an’ 
serious as an old owl, an’ doesn’t care a rap for a good 
time, for all his thirty thousand a year. An’ I'll bet he’s 
not particularly joyful at seein’ others have a good time. 
Ain't I right?” 

She nodded her head in agreement, and hastened to ex- 
plain: — 

“But he is not that type of man. By nature he is sober 
and serious. He always was that.” 

“You can bet he was,” Martin proclaimed. ‘“ Three 
dollars a week, an’ four dollars a week, an’ a young boy 
cookin’ for himself on an oil-burner an’ layin’ up money, 
workin’ all day an’ studyin’ all night, just workin’ an’ 
never playin’, never havin’ a good time, an’ never learnin’ 
how to have a good time — of course his thirty thousand 
came along too late.” 

His sympathetic imagination was flashing upon his inner 
sight all the thousands of details of the boy’s existence 
and of his narrow spiritual development into a thirty- 
thousand-dollar-a-year man. With theswiftness and wide- 
reaching of multitudinous thought Charles Butler’s whole 
life was telescoped upon his vision. 

“Do you know,” he added, “I feel sorry for Mr. Butler. 


MARTIN EDEN 73 


He was too young to know better, but he-robbed himself 
of life for the sake of thirty thousand a year that’s clean 
wasted upon him. Why, thirty thousand, lump sum, 
wouldn’t buy for him right now what ten cents he was 
layin’ up would have bought him, when he was a kid, in 
the way of candy an’ peanuts or a seat in nigger heaven.” 

It was just such uniqueness of points of view that startled 
Ruth. Not only were they new to her, and contrary to 
her own beliefs, but she always felt in them germs of truth 
that threatened to unseat or modify her own convictions. 
Had she been fourteen instead of twenty-four, she might 
have been changed by them; but she was twenty-four, 
conservative by nature and upbringing, and already crys- 
tallized into the cranny of life where she had been born 
and formed. It was true, his bizarre judgments troubled 
her in the moments they were uttered, but she ascribed 
them to his novelty of type and strangeness of living, and 
they were soon forgotten. Nevertheless, while she dis- 
approved of them, the strength of their utterance, and the 
flashing of eyes and earnestness of face that accompanied 
them, always thrilled her and drew her toward him. She 
would never have guessed that this man who had come from 
beyond her horizon, was, in such moments, flashing on be- 
yond her horizon with wider and deeper concepts. Her 
own limits were the limits of her horizon; but limited 
minds can recognize limitations only in others. And so 
she felt that her outlook was very wide indeed, and that 
where his conflicted with hers marked his limitations; and 
she dreamed of helping him to see as she saw, of widening 
his horizon until it was identified with hers. 

“ But I have not finished my story,” she said. ‘“ He 
worked, so father says, as no other office boy he ever had. 
Mr. Butler was always eager to work. Henever was late, 
and he was usually at the office a few minutes before his 
regular time. And yet he saved his time. Every spare 
moment was devoted to study. He studied book-keeping 
and type-writing, and he paid for lessons in shorthand by 
dictating at night to a court reporter who needed practice. 

He quickly became a clerk, and he made himself invaluable. 


74 MARTIN EDEN 


Father appreciated him and saw that he was bound to 
rise. It was on father’s suggestion that he went to law 
college. He became a lawyer, and hardly was he back in 
the office when father took him in as junior partner. He 
is a great man. He refused the United States Senate 
several times, and father says he could become a justice of 
“the Supreme Court any time a vacancy occurs, if he wants 
to. Such a life is an inspiration to all of us. It shows 
us that a man with will may rise superior to his environ- 
ment.” 

“ He is a great man,” Martin said sincerely. 

But it seemed to him there was something in the recital 
that jarred upon his sense of beauty and life. He could 
not find an adequate motive in Mr. Butler’s life of pinching 
and privation. Had he done it for love of a woman, or 
for attainment of beauty, Martin would have understood. 
God’s own mad lover should do anything for the kiss, but 
not for thirty thousand dollars a year. He was dissatis- 
fied with Mr. Butler’s career. There was something paltry 
aboutit, afterall. Thirty thousand a year was all right, but 
dyspepsia and inability to be humanly happy robbed such 
princely income of all its value. 

Much of this he strove to express to Ruth, and shocked 
her and made it clear that more remodelling was necessary. 
Hers was that common insularity of mind that makes hu- 
man creatures believe that their color, creed, and politics 
are best and right and that other human creatures scat- 
tered over the world are less fortunately placed than they. 
It was the same insularity of mind that made the ancient 
Jew thank God he was not born a woman, and sent the mod- 
ern missionary god-substituting to the ends of the earth; 
and it made Ruth desire to shape this man from other 
crannies of life into the likeness of the men who lived in 
her particular cranny of life. 


CHAPTER IX 


BAcxk from sea Martin Eden came, homing for California 
with a lover’s desire. His store of money exhausted, he 
had shipped before the mast on the treasure-hunting 
schooner; and the Solomon Islands, after eight months of 
failure to find treasure, had witnessed the breaking up of 
the expedition. The men had been paid off in Australia, 
and Martin had immediately shipped on a deep-water 
vessel for San Francisco. Not alone had those eight 
months earned him enough money to stay on land for 
many weeks, but they had enabled him to do a great deal 
of studying and reading. 

His was the student’s mind, and behind his ability to 
learn was the indomitability of his nature and his love for 
Ruth. The grammar he had taken along he went through 
again and again until his unjaded brain had mastered it. 
He noticed the bad grammar used by his shipmates, and 
made a point of mentally correcting and reconstructing 
their crudities of speech. To his great joy he discovered 
that his ear was becoming sensitive and that he was de- 
veloping grammatical nerves. A double negative jarred 
him like a discord, and often, from lack of practice, it 
was from his own lips that the jar came. His tongue re- 
fused to learn new tricks in a day. 

After he had been through the grammar repeatedly, he 
took up the dictionary and added twenty words a day tox, 
his vocabulary. He found that this was no light task, 
and at wheel or lookout he steadily went over and over 
his lengthening list of pronunciations and definitions, while 
he invariably memorized himself to sleep. ‘Never did 
anything,” “if I were,” and “those things,” were phrases, 
with many variations, that he repeated under his breath 
in order to accustom his tongue to the language spoken 

75 


76 MARTIN EDEN 


by, Ruth, Ande and! ting,” withthe td” and «iseas 
pronounced emphatically, he went over thousands of times ; 
and to his surprise he noticed that he was beginning to 
speak cleaner and more correct English than the officers 
themselves and the gentleman-adventurers in the cabin 
who had financed the expedition. 

The captain was a fishy-eyed Norwegian who somehow 
had fallen into possession of a complete Shakespeare, which 
he never read, and Martin had washed his clothes for him 
and in return been permitted access to the precious 
volumes. For a time, so steeped was he in the plays and 
in the many favorite passages that impressed themselves 
almost without effort on his brain, that all the world 
seemed to shape itself into forms of Elizabethan tragedy 
or comedy and his very thoughts were in blank verse. It 
trained his ear and gave him a fine appreciation for noble 
English; withal it introduced into his mind much that was 
archaic and obsolete. 

The eight months had been well spent, and, in addition 
to what he had learned of right speaking and high think- 
ing, he had learned much of himself. Along with his 
humbleness because he knew so little, there arose a con- 
“*viction of power. He felt a sharp gradation between 
himself and his shipmates, and was wise enough to realize 
that the difference lay in potentiality rather than achiev- 
ment. What he could do, they could do; but within him 
he felt a confused ferment working that told him there 
was more in him than he had done. He was tortured by 
the exquisite beauty of the world, and wished that Ruth 
were there to share it with him. He decided that he 
would describe to her many of the bits of South Sea 
beauty. The creative spirit in him flamed up at the 
thought and urged that he recreate this beauty for a wider 
audience than Ruth. And then, in splendor and glory, 


~., came the great idea. He would write. He would be 


one of the eyes through which the world saw, one of the 
ears through which it heard, one of the hearts through 
which it felt. He would write—everything — poetry 
and prose, fiction and description, and plays like Shake- 


MARTIN EDEN T7 


speare. There was career and the way to win to Ruth. 
The men of literature were the world’s giants, and he 
conceived them to be far finer than the Mr. Butlers who 
_ earned thirty thousand a year and could be Supreme 
Court justices if they wanted to. 

Once the idea had germinated, it mastered him, and the 
return voyage to San Francisco was hike a dream. He 
was drunken with unguessed power and felt that he could 
do anything. In the midst of the great and lonely sea he 
gained perspective. Clearly, and for the first time, he 
saw Ruth and her world. It was all visualized in his 
mind as a concrete thing which he could take up in his 
two hands and turn around and about and examine. There 
was much that was dim and nebulous in that world, but 
he saw it as a whole and not in detail, and he saw, also, 
the way to master it. To write! The thought was fire 
in him. He would begin as soon as he got back. The 
first thing he would do would be to describe the voyage 
of the treasure-hunters. He would sell it to some San 
Francisco newspaper. He would not tell Ruth anything 
about it, and she would be surprised and pleased when she 
saw his name in print. While he wrote, he could go on 
studying. There were twenty-four hours in each day. 
He wasinvincible. He knew how to work, and the citadels 
would go down before him. He would not have to go to 
sea again—-as a sailor; and for the instant he caught a . 
vision of a steam yacht. There were other writers who} 
possessed steam yachts. Of course, he cautioned himself, 
it would be slow succeeding at first, and for a time he 
would be content to earn enough money by his writing to 
enable him to goon studying. And then, after some time, 
—a very indeterminate time, — when he had learned and 
prepared himself, he would write the great things and his 
name would be on all men’s lips. But greater than that, 
infinitely greater and greatest of all, he would have proved 
himself worthy of Ruth. Fame was all very well, but it 
was for Ruth that his splendid dream arose. He was not 
a fame-monger, but merely one of God’s mad lovers. 

- Arrived in Oakland, with his snug pay-day in his pocket, 


78 MARTIN EDEN 


he took up his old room at Bernard Higginbotham’s and 
set to work. He did noteven let Ruth know he was back. 
He would go and see her when he finished the article on 
the treasure-hunters. It was not so difficult to abstain 
from seeing her, because of the violent heat of creative 
fever that burned in him. Besides, the very article he 
was writing would bring her nearer to him. He did not 
know how long an article he should write, but he counted 
the words in a double-page article in the Sunday supple- 
ment of the San Francisco Examiner, and guided himself by 
that. Three days, at white heat, completed his narrative ; 
but when he had copied it carefully, in a large scrawl that 
was easy to read, he learned from a rhetoric he picked up in 
the library that there were such things as paragraphs and 
quotation marks. He had never thought of such things 
before; and he promptly set to work writing the article 
over, referring continually to the pages of the rhetoric 
and learning more in a day about composition than the 
average schoolboy in a year. When he had copied the 
article a second time and rolled it up carefully, he read ina 
newspaper an item on hints to beginners, and discovered 
the iron law that manuscripts should never be rolled and 
that they should be written on one side of the paper. He 
had violated the law on both counts. Also, he learned 
from the item that first-class papers paid a minimum of 
ten dollars a column. So, while he copied the manuscript 
a third time, he consoled himself by multiplying ten 
columns by ten dollars. ‘The product was always the 
same, one hundred dollars, and he decided that that was 
better than seafaring. If it hadn’t been for his blunders, 
he would have finished the article in three days. One 
hundred dollars in three days! It would have taken 
him three months and longer on the sea to earn a similar 
amount. A man was a fool to go to sea when he could 
write, he concluded, though the money in itself meant 
nothing to him. Its value was in the liberty it would get 
him, the presentable garments it would buy him, all of 
which would bring him nearer, swiftly nearer, to the 
slender, pale girl who had turned his life back upon itself 
and given him inspiration. : 


MARTIN EDEN 79 


He mailed the manuscript in a flat- envelope, and 
addressed it to the editor of the San Francisco Hxam- 
iner. He had an idea that anything accepted by a paper 
was published immediately, and as he had sent the man- 
uscript in on Friday he expected it to come out on the 
following Sunday. He conceived that it would be fine 
to let that event apprise Ruth of his return. Then, Sun- 
day afternoon, he would call and see her. In the mean- 
time he was occupied by another idea, which he prided 
himself upon as being a particularly sane, careful, and 
modest idea. He would write an adventure story for 
boys and sell it to The Youth's Companion. He went 
to the free reading-room and looked through the files of 
The Youth's Companion. Serial stories, he found, were 
usually published in that weekly in five instalments of 
about three thousand words each. He discovered several 
serials that ran to seven instalments, and decided to write 
one of that length. 

He had been on a whaling voyage in the Arctic, once — 
a voyage that was to have been for three years and which 
had terminated in shipwreck at the end of six months. 
While his imagination was fanciful, even fantastic at 
times, he had a basic love of reality that compelled him 
to write about the things he knew. He knew whaling, and 
out of the real materials of his knowledge he proceeded to 
manufacture the fictitious adventures of the two boys he 
intended to use as joint heroes. It was easy work, he 
decided on Saturday evening. He had completed on that 
day the first instalment of three thousand words—much 
to the amusement of Jim, and to the open derision of Mr. 
Higginbotham, who sneered throughout meal-time at the 
“litery”’ person they had discovered in the family. 

Martin contented himself by picturing his brother-in- 
law’s surprise on Sunday morning when he opened his 
Hxeaminer and saw the article on the treasure-hunters. 
Early that morning he was out himself to the front door, 
nervously racing through the many-sheeted newspaper. 
He went through it a second time, very carefully, then 
folded it up and left it where he had found it. He was 


80 MARTIN EDEN 


glad he had not told any one about his article. On 
second thought he concluded that he had been wrong 
about the speed with which things found their way into 
newspaper columns. Besides, there had not been any 
news value in his article, and most likely the editor would 
write to him about it first. 

After breakfast he went on with his serial. The words 
flowed from his pen, though he broke off from the writing 
frequently to look up definitions in the dictionary or 
to refer to the rhetoric. He often read or re-read a 
chapter at a time, during such pauses; and he consoled 
himself that while he was not writing the great things 
he felt to be in him, he was learning composition, at any 
rate, and training himself to shape up and express his 
thoughts. He toiled on till dark, when he went out to 
the reading-room and explored magazines and weeklies 
until the place closed at ten o’clock. This was his pro- 
gramme for a week. Each day he did three thousand words, 
and each evening he puzzled his way through the maga- 
zines, taking note of the stories, articles, and poems that 
editors saw fit to publish. One thing was certain: What 
these multitudinous writers did he could do, and only 
give him time and he would do what they could not do. 
He was cheered to read in Book News, in a paragraph 
on the payment of magazine writers, not that Rudyard 
Kipling received a dollar per word, but that the minimum 
rate paid by first-class magazines was two cents a word. 
The Youths Companion was certainly first class, and at 
that rate the three thousand words he had written that 


... day would bring him sixty dollars—two months’ wages 
“on the sea! 


On Friday night he finished the serial, twenty-one thou- 
sand words long. At two cents a word, he calculated, 
that would bring him four hundred and twenty dollars. 
Not a bad week’s work. It was more money than he had 
ever possessed at one time. He did not know how he 
could spend it all. He had tapped a gold mine. Where 
this came from he could always get more. He planned 
to buy some more clothes, to subscribe to many magazines, 


MARTIN EDEN 81 


and to buy dozens of reference books that at present he 
was compelled to go to the library to consult. And still 
there was a large portion of the four hundred and twenty 
dollars unspent. This worried him until the thought 
came to him of hiring a servant for Gertrude and of 
buying a bicycle for Marion. 

He mailed the bulky manuscript to The Youth’s Com- 
panion, and on Saturday afternoon, after having planned 
an article on pearl-diving, he went to see Ruth. He had 
telephoned, and she went herself to greet him at the door. 
The old familiar blaze of health rushed out from him and 
struck her like a blow. It seemed to enter into her body 
and course through her veins in a liquid glow, and to set 
her quivering with its imparted strength. He flushed 
warmly as he took her hand and looked into her blue 
eyes, but the fresh bronze of eight months of sun hid the 
flush, though it did not protect the neck from the gnaw- 
ing chafe of the stiff collar. She noted the red line of it 
with amusement which quickly vanished as she glanced 
at his clothes. They really fitted him, —it was his first 
made-to-order suit,—and he seemed slimmer and better 
modelled. In addition, his cloth cap had been replaced_/ 
by a soft hat, which she commanded him to put on and 
then complimented him on his appearance. She did not 
remember when she had felt so happy. This change in 
him was her handiwork, and she was proud of it and fired 
with ambition further to help him. 

But the most radical change of all, and the one that 
pleased her most, was the change in his speech. Notonly , 
did he speak more correctly, but he spoke more easily, and” 
there were many new words in his vocabulary. When he 
grew excited or enthusiastic, however, he dropped back 
into the old slurring and the dropping of final consonants. 
Also, there was an awkward hesitancy, at times, as he es- 
sayed the new words he had learned. On the other hand, 
along with his ease of expression, he displayed a lightness 
and facetiousness of thought that delighted her. It was 
his old spirit of humor and badinage that had made him a 

favorite in his own class, but which he had hitherto been 
G 


82 MARTIN EDEN 


unable to use in her presence through lack of words and 
training. He was just beginning to orientate himself and 
to feel that he was not wholly an intruder. But he was 
very tentative, fastidiously so, letting Ruth set the pace of 
sprightliness and fancy, keeping up with her but never 
daring to go beyond her. 

He told her of what he had been doing, and of his plan 
to write for a livelihood and of going on with his studies. 
But he was disappointed at her lack of approval. She did 
not think much of his plan. 

“ You see,” she said frankly, “ writing must be a trade, 
like anything else. Not that I know anything about it, of 
course. I only bring common judgment to bear. You 
couldn’t hope to be a blacksmith without spending three 
years at learning the trade —or is it five years! Now 
writers are so much better paid than blacksmiths that there 
must be ever so many more men who would like to write, 
who— try to write.” 

“But then, may not I be peculiarly constituted to write?” 
he queried, secretly exulting at the language he had used, 
his swift imagination throwing the whole scene and atmos- 
phere upon a vast screen along with a thousand other 
scenes from his hife—scenes that were rough and raw, 
gross and bestial. 

The whole composite vision was achieved with the speed 
of light, producing no pause in the conversation, nor in- 
terrupting his calm train of thought. On the screen of 
his imagination he saw himself and this sweet and beauti- 
ful girl, facing each other and conversing in good English, 


». Ina room of books and paintings and tone and culture, 


and all illuminated by a brightlight of steadfast brilliance ; 
while ranged about and fading away to the remote edges 
of the screen were antithetical scenes, each scene a picture, 
and he the onlooker, free to look at will upon what he 
wished. He saw these other scenes through drifting va- 
pors and swirls of sullen fog dissolving before shafts of 
red and garish light. He saw cowboys at the bar, drink- 
ing fierce whiskey, the air filled with obscenity and ribald 
language, and he saw himself with them, drinking and 


MARTIN EDEN 83 


cursing with the wildest, or sitting at table with them, 
under smoking kerosene lamps, while the chips clicked 
and clattered and the cards were dealt around. He saw 
himself, stripped to the waist, with naked fists, fighting 
his great fight with Liverpool Red in the forecastle of 
the Susquehanna; and he saw the bloody deck of the 
John Rogers, that gray morning of attempted mutiny, 
the mate kicking in death-throes on the main-hatch, the 
revolver in the old man’s hand spitting fire and smoke, 
the men with passion-wrenched faces, of brutes screaming 
vile blasphemies and falling about him — and then he re- 
turned to the central scene, calm and clean in the steadfast 
light, where Ruth sat and talked with him amid books and 
paintings ; and he saw the grand piano upon which she 
would later play to him; and he heard the echoes of his 
own selected and correct words, “ But then, may I not be 
peculiarly constituted to write ?” 

“ But no matter how peculiarly constituted a man may 
be for blacksmithing,” she was laughing, “I never heard 
of one becoming a blacksmith without first serving his ap- 
prenticeship.” 

“What would you advise?” heasked. “ And don’t for- 
get that I feel in me this capacity to write—I can’t ex- 
plain it; I just know that it is in me.” 

‘You must get a thorough education,” was the answer, 
‘whether or not you ultimately become a writer. This 
education is indispensable for whatever career you select, 
and it must not be slipshod or sketchy. You should goto 
high school.” 

“Yes —” he began; but she interrupted with an after- 
thought : — 

“ Of course, you could go on with your writing, too.” 

“I would have to,” he said grimly. 

“Why?” She looked at him, prettily puzzled, for she did 
not quite like the persistence with which he clung to his 
notion. 

“ Because, without writing there wouldn’t be any 
high school. I must live and buy books and clothes, you 
know.” 


84 MARTIN EDEN 


“Td forgotten that,” she laughed. ‘“ Why weren’t you 
born with an income ?”’ 

“T’d rather have good health and imagination,” he an- 
* swered. ‘I can make good on the income, but the other 
things have to be made good for —” He almost said “ you,” 
then amended his sentence to, “ have to be made good for 
one.” 

“ Don’t say ‘make good,’” she cried, sweetly petulant. 
“It’s slang, and it’s horrid.” 

He flushed, and stammered, ‘“ That’s right, and I only 
wish you'd correct me every time.” 

«J__T’d like to,’ she said haltingly. “You have 
so much in you that is good that I want to see you per- 
feet.” 

He was clay in her hands immediately, as passionately 
. desirous of being moulded by her as she was desirous of 

‘shaping him into the image of her ideal of man. And 
when she pointed out the opportuneness of the time, that 
the entrance examinations to high school began on the fol- 
lowing Monday, he promptly volunteered that he would 
take them. 

Then she played and sang to him, while he gazed with 
hungry yearning at her, drinking in her loveliness and 
marvelling that there should not be a hundred suitors lis- 
tening there and longing for her as he listened and longed. 


CHAPTER X 


HE stopped to dinner that evening, and, much to Ruth’s 
satisfaction, made a favorable impression on her father. 
They talked about the sea as a career, a subject which 
Martin had at his finger-ends, and Mr. Morse remarked 
afterward that he seemed a very clear-headed young 
man. In his avoidance of slang and his search after right 
words, Martin was compelled to talk slowly, which en- 
abled him to find the best thoughts that were in him. He 
was more at ease than that first night at dinner, nearly 
a year before, and his shyness and modesty even com- 
mended him to Mrs. Morse, who was pleased at his 
manifest improvement. 

“He is the first man that ever drew passing notice from 
Ruth,” she told her husband. “She has been so singu- 
larly backward where men are concerned that I have been 
worried greatly.” 

Mr. Morse looked at his wife curiously. 

‘You mean to use this young sailor to wake her up?” 
he questioned. 

“I mean that she is not to die an old maid if I can help 
it,’ was the answer. “If this young Eden can arouse her 
interest in mankind in general, it will be a good thing.” 
“A very good thing,” he commented. ‘ But suppose, 
and we must suppose, sometimes, my dear, — suppose 
he arouses her interest too particularly in him ?” 

“ Impossible,” Mrs. Morse laughed. “She is three 
years older than he, and, besides, it is impossible. Noth- 
ing will ever come of it. Trust that to me.” 

And so Martin’s role was arranged for him, while he, 
led on by Arthur and Norman, was meditating an ex- 
travagance. They were going out for a ride into the 
hills Sunday morning on their wheels, which did not 
interest Martin until he learned that Ruth, too, rode a 

85 





86 MARTIN EDEN 


wheel and was going along. He did not ride, nor own a 
wheel, but if Ruth rode, it was up to him to begin, was 
his decision; and when he said good night, he stopped in 
at a cyclery on his way home and spent forty dollars for 
a wheel. It was more than a month’s hard-earned wages, 
and it reduced his stock of money amazingly; but when 
he added the hundred dollars he was to receive from 
the Hxaminer to the four hundred and twenty dollars 
that was the least Zhe Youth’s Companion could pay him, 
he felt that he had reduced the perplexity the unwonted 
amount of money had caused him. Nor did he mind, in 
the course of learning to ride the wheel home, the fact 
that he ruined his suit of clothes. He caught the tailor 
by telephone that night from Mr. Higginbotham’s store 
and ordered another suit. Then he carried the wheel up 
the narrow stairway that clung like a fire-escape to the 
rear wall of the building, and when he had moved his bed 
out from the wall, found there was just space enough in 
the small room for himself and the wheel. 

Sunday he had intended to devote to studying for the 
high school examination, but the pearl-diving article lured 
him away, and he spent the day in the white-hot fever of 
re-creating the beauty and romance that burned in him. 
The fact that the Examiner of that morning had failed 
to publish his treasure-hunting article did not dash his 
spirits. He was at too great a height for that, and hav- 
ing been deaf to a twice-repeated summons, he went 
without the heavy Sunday dinner with which Mr. Hig- 
ginbotham invariably graced his table. To Mr. Higgin- 
botham such a dinner was advertisement of his worldly 
‘ achievement and prosperity, and he honored it by de- 
livering platitudinous sermonettes upon American insti- 
tutions and the opportunity said institutions gave to any 
« hard-working man to rise — the rise, in his case, which he 
pointed out unfailingly, being from a grocer’s clerk to the 
ownership of Higginbotham’s Cash Store. 

Martin Eden looked with a sigh at his unfinished “ Pearl- 
diving ” on Monday morning, and took the car down to 
Oakland to the high school. And when, days later, he 


MARTIN EDEN 87 


applied for the results of his examinations, he learned 
that he had failed in everything save grammar. 

“Your grammar is excellent,” Professor Hilton in- 
formed him, staring at him through heavy spectacles ; 
“but you know nothing, positively nothing, in the other 
branches, and your United States history is abominable — 
there is no other word for it, abominable. I should 
advise you—” 

Professor Hilton paused and glared at him, unsympa- 
thetic and unimaginative as one of his own test-tubes. He 
was professor of physics in the high school, possessor of a 
large family, a meagre salary, and a select fund of parrot-~ 
learned knowledge. 

“ Yes, sir,” Martin said humbly, wishing somehow that 
the man at the desk in the library was in Professor 
Hilton’s place just then. 

“And I should advise you to go back to the grammar 
school for at least two years. Good day.” 

Martin was not deeply affected by his failure, though 
he was surprised at Ruth’s shocked expression when he 
told her Professor Hilton’s advice. Her disappointment 
was so evident that he was sorry he had failed, but chiefly 
so for her sake. 

“ You see I was right,” she said. ‘ You know far more 
than any of the students entering high school, and yet 
you can’t pass the examinations. It is because what edu- 
cation you have is fragmentary, sketchy. You need the 
discipline of study, such as only skilled teachers can give 
you. You must be thoroughly grounded. Professor Hil- 
ton is right, and if I were you, I’d go to night school. A 
year and a half of it might enable you to catch up that 
additional six months. Besides, that would leave you 
your days in which to write, or, if you could not make 
your living by your pen, you would have your days in 
which to work in some position.”’ 

But if my days are taken up with work and my nights 
with school, when am I going to see you ?— was Martin’s 
first thought, though he refrained from uttering it. In- 
stead, he said : — 


88 MARTIN EDEN 


“It seems so babyish for me to be going to night school. 
But I wouldn’t mind that if I thought it would pay. 
But I don’t think it will pay. I can do the work quicker 
than they can teach me. It would be a loss of time—” 
he thought of her and his desire to have her — “and I can’t 
afford the time. I haven’t the time to spare, in fact.” 

“There is so much that is necessary.” She looked at 
him gently, and he felt that he was a brute to oppose her. 
‘Physics and chemistry— you can’t do them without 
laboratory study ; and you'll find algebra and geometry 
almost hopeless without instruction. You need the skilled 
teachers, the specialists in the art of imparting knowledge.” 

He was silent for a minute, casting about for the least 
vainglorious way in which to express himself. 

“Please don’t think I’m bragging,” he began. “I 
don’t intend it that way at all. But I have a feeling that 
I am what I may call a natural student. I can study by 
myself. I take to it kindly, like a duck to water. You 
see yourself what I did with grammar. And I’ve learned 
much of other things — you would never dream how much. 
And I’m only getting started. Wait till Iget—” He 
hesitated and assured himself of the pronunciation before 
he said “momentum. I’m getting my first real feel of 
things now. I’m beginning to size up the situation —”’ 

* Please don’t say ‘size up,’”’ she interrupted. 

“'To get a line on things,” he hastily amended. 

“That doesn’t mean anything in correct English,” she 
objected. 

He floundered for a fresh start. 

“ What I’m driving at is that ’m beginning to get the 
lay of the land.” 

Out of pity she forebore, and he went on. 

“Knowledge seems to me like a chart-room. When- 
ever I go into the library, I am impressed that way. The 
part played by teachers is to teach the student the con- 
tents of the chart-room in a systematic way. The 
teachers are guides to the chart-room, that’s all. It’s 
not something that they have in their own heads. They 
don’t make it up, don’t create it. It’s all in the chart- 


MARTIN EDEN 89 


room and they know their way about in it, and it’s their 
business to show the place to strangers who might else 
get lost. Now I don’t get lost easily. I have the bump 
of location. I usually know where I’m at— What’s 
wrong now?” 

* Don’t say ‘ where I’m at.’ ” 

“That’s right,” he said gratefully, “where I am. But 
where am I at—I mean, where am I? Oh, yes, in the 
chart-room. Well, some people —” 

“ Persons,” she corrected. 

“Some persons need guides, most persons do; but I 
think I can get along without them. I’ve spent a lot of 
time in, the chart-room now, and I’m on the edge of 
knowing my way about, what charts I want to refer to, 
what coasts I wait to explore. And from the way I line 
it up, Pll explore a whole lot more quickly by myself. 
The speed of a fleet, you know, is the speed of the slowest 
ship, and the speed of the teachers is affected the same 
way. ‘They can’t go any faster than the ruck of their 
scholars, and I can set a faster pace for myself than they 
set for a whole schoolroom.” 

“<« He travels the fastest who travels alone, 
at him. 

But Pd travel faster with you just the same, was whad 
he wanted to blurt out, as he caught a vision of a world. 
without end of sunlit spaces and starry voids through \ ri 
which he drifted with her, his arm around her, her pale ) 
gold hair blowing about his face. In the same instant he 
was aware of the pitiful inadequacy of speech. God! If 
he could so frame words that she could see what he then 
saw! And he felt the stir in him, like a throe of yearn- 
ing pain, of the desire to paint these visions that flashed 
unsummoned on the mirror of his mind. Ah, that was 
it! He caught at the hem of the secret. It was the very 
thing that the great writers and master-poets did. That 
was why they were giants. They knew how to express 
what they thought, and felt, and saw. Dogs asleep in 
the sun often whined and barked, but they were unable 
to tell what they saw that made them whine and bark. 


99) 


she quoted 


90 MARTIN EDEN 


He had often wondered what it was. And that was all 
he was, a dog asleep in the sun. He saw noble and 
beautiful visions, but he could only whine and bark at 
Ruth. But he would cease sleeping in the sun. He 
would stand up, with open eyes, and he would struggle 
, and toil and learn until, with eyes unblinded and tongue 
untied, he could share with her his visioned wealth. 
Other men had discovered the trick of expression, of 
making words obedient servitors, and of making combina- 
tions of words mean more than the sum of their separate 
meanings. He was stirred profoundly by the passing 
olimpse at the secret, and he was again caught up in the 
vision of sunlit spaces and starry voids —unti! it came 
. to him that it was very quiet, and he saw wth re- 
garding him with an amused expressicn and a smile in 
her eyes. 

T vhave, Nadea great visioning,” he said, and at the 
sound of his words in his own ears his heart gave a leap. 
Where had those words come from? ‘They had adequately 
expressed the pause his vision had put in the conversation. 
It was a miracle. Never had he so loftily framed a lofty 
thought. But never had he attempted to frame lofty 
thoughts in words. That was it. That explained it. 
He had never tried. But Swinburne had, and Tennyson, 
and Kipling, and all the other poets. His mind flashed 
on to his “ Pearl-diving.” He had never dared the big 
things, the spirit of the beauty that was a fire in him. 
That article would be a different thing when he was done 
with it. He was appalled by the vastness of the beauty 
that rightfully belonged in it, and again his mind flashed 
and dared, and he demanded of himself why he could not 
chant that beauty in noble verse as the great poets did. 
And there was all the mysterious delight and spiritual 
wonder of his love for Ruth. Why could he not chant 
that, too, as the poets did? They had sung of love. So 
would he. By God !— 

_ And in his frightened ears he heard his exclamation 
echoing. Carried away, he had breathed it aloud. The 
blood surged into his face, wave upon wave, mastering 


MARTIN EDEN 91 


the bronze of it till the blush of shame flaunted itself 
from collar-rim to the roots of his hair. 

“J — [— beg your pardon,” he stammered. “I was 
thinking.” 

“Tt sounded as if you were praying,” she said bravely, 
but she felt herself inside to be withering and shrinking. 
It was the first time she had heard an oath from the lips 
of a man she knew, and she was shocked, not merely as a 
matter of principle and training, but shocked in spirit by 
this rough blast of life in the garden of her sheltered 
maidenhood. 

But she forgave, and with surprise at the ease of her 
forgiveness. Somehow it was not so difficult to forgive 
him anything. He had not had a chance to be as other 
men, and he was trying so hard, and succeeding, too. It 
never entered her head that there could be any other 
reason for her being kindly disposed toward him. She 
was tenderly disposed toward him, but she did not know 
it. She had no way of knowing it. The placid poise of 
twenty-four years without a single love affair did not fit 
her with a keen perception of her own feelings, and she 
who had never warmed to actual love was unaware that 
she was warming now. 


CHAPTER XI 


MARTIN went back to his pearl-diving article, which 
would have been finished sooner if it had not been broken 
in upon so frequently by his attempts to write poetry. 
His poems were love poems, inspired by Ruth, but they 
were never completed. Not in a day could he learn to 
chant in noble verse. Rhyme and metre and structure 
were serious enough in themselves, but there was, over 
and beyond them, an intangible and evasive something 
that he caught in all great poetry, but which he could not 
catch and imprison in his own. It was the elusive spirit 
of poetry itself that he sensed and sought after but could 
not capture. It seemed a glow to him, a warm and trail- 
ing vapor, ever beyond his reaching, though sometimes he 
was rewarded by catching at shreds of it and weaving 
them into phrases that echoed in his brain with haunting 
notes or drifted across his vision in misty wafture of un- 
seen beauty. It was baffling. He ached with desire to 
express and could but gibber prosaically as everybody 
gibbered. He read his fragments aloud. ‘The metre 
marched along on perfect feet, and the rhyme pounded a 
longer and equally faultless rhythm, but the glow and high 
exaltation that he felt within were lacking. He could not 
understand, and time and again, in despair, defeated and 
depressed, he returned to his article. Prose was certainly 
an easier medium. 

Following the “ Pearl-diving,” he wrote an article on 
the sea as a career, another on turtle-catching, and a third 
on the northeast trades. ‘Then he tried, as an experi- 
-ment, a short story, and before he broke his stride he had 
finished six short stories and despatched them to various 
magazines. He wrote prolifically, intensely, from morn- 
ing till night, and late at night, except when he broke off 

92 


/ 


MARTIN EDEN 93 


to go to the reading-room, draw books from the library, 
or to call on Ruth. He was profoundly happy. Life was 
pitched high. He was in a fever that never broke. The, 

joy of creation that is supposed to belong to the gods was ¥ 
his. All the life about him — the odors of stale vegetables 
and soapsuds, the slatternly form of his sister, and the 
jeering face of Mr. Higginbotham — was a dream. The 
real world was in his mind, and the stories he wrote were 
so many pieces of reality out of his mind. 

The days were too short. There was so much he 
wanted to study. He cut his sleep down to five hours 
and found that he could*get along upon it. He tried 
four hours and a half, and regretfully came back to five. 
He could joyfully have spent all his waking hours upon 
any one of his pursuits. It was with regret that he ceased 
from writing to study, that he ceased from study to go to 
the library, that he tore himself away from that chart-room 
of knowledge or from the magazines in the reading-room 
that were filled with the secrets of writers who suc- 
ceeded in selling their wares. It was like severing heart- 
strings, when he was with Ruth,.to stand up and go; and 
he scorched through the dark streets so as to get home to 
his books at the least possible expense of time. And 
hardest of all was it to shut up the algebra or physics, 
put note-book and pencil aside, and close his tired eyes in 
sleep. He hated the thought of ceasing to live, even for 
so short a time, and his sole consolation was that the alarm 
clock was set five hours ahead. He would lose only five 
hours anyway, and then the jangling bell would jerk him 
out of unconsciousness and he would have before him 
another glorious day of nineteen hours. 

In the meantime the weeks were passing, his money 
was ebbing low, and there was no money coming in. A 
month after he had mailed it, the adventure serial for 
boys was returned to him by The Youth's Companion. 
The rejection slip was so tactfully worded that he felt 
kindly toward the editor. But he did not feel so 
kindly toward the editor of the San Francisco Examiner. 
After waiting two whole weeks, Martin had written to 


94 MARTIN EDEN 


him. A week later he wrote again. At the end of the 
month, he went over to San Franscisco and personally 
called upon the editor. But he did not meet that exalted 
personage, thanks to a Cerberus of an office boy, of tender 
years and red hair, who guarded the portals. At the end 
of the fifth week the manuscript came back to him, by 
mail, without comment. ‘There was no rejection slip, no 
explanation, nothing. In the same way his other articles 
were tied up with the other leading San Francisco papers. 
When he recovered them, he sent them to the magazines 
in the East, from which they were returned more promptly, 
accompanied always by the printed rejection slips. 

The short stories were returned in similar fashion. He 
read them over and over, and liked them so much that he 
could not puzzle out the cause of their rejection, until, 
one day, he read in a newspaper that manuscripts should 
always be typewritten. That explained it. Of course 
editors were so busy that they could not afford the time 
and strain of reading handwriting. Martin rented a 
typewriter and spent a day mastering the machine. Each 
day he typed what he composed, and he typed his earlier 
manuscripts as fast as they were returned him. He was 
surprised when the typed ones began to come back. His 
jaw seemed to become squarer, his chin more aggressive, 
and he bundled the manuscripts off to new editors. 

The thought came to him that he was not a good judge 
of his own work. He tried it out on Gertrude. He read 
his stories aloud to her. Her eyes glistened, and she 
looked at him proudly as she said : — 

* Ain’t it grand, you writin’ those sort of things.” 

“ Yes, yes,” he demanded impatiently. ‘ But the story 
—how did you like it ?” 

“ Just grand,” was the reply. “Just grand, an’ thrill- 
ing, too, I was all worked up.” 

He could see that her mind was not clear. The per- 
plexity was strong in her good-natured face. So he 
waited. 

“ But, say, Mart,” after a long pause, “ how did it end? 
Did that young man who spoke so highfalutin’ get her ? ” 


MARTIN EDEN 95 


And, after he had explained the end, which he thought 
he had made artistically obvious, she would say : — 

“ That’s what I wanted to know. Why didn’t you write 
that way in the story?” 

One thing he learned, after he had read her a number 
of stories, namely, that she liked happy endings. | 
“That story was perfectly grand,” she announced, 
straightening up from the wash-tub with a tired sigh and 
wiping the sweat from her forehead with a red, steamy 
hand; ‘but it makes me sad. I wanttocry. There is 
too many sad things in the world anyway. It makes me 
happy to think about happy things. Now if he’d married 
her, and— You don’t mind, Mart?” she queried appre- 
hensively. “I just happen to feel that way, because 
I’m tired, I guess. But the story was grand just the 
same, perfectly grand. Where are you goin’ to sell it?” 

“That’s a horse of another color,” he laughed. 

“But if you did sell it, what do you think you'd get 
for it?” | 

‘Oh, a hundred dollars. That would be the least, the 
way prices go.” 

*“ My! I do hope you'll sell it!” 

“Hasy money, eh?” Then he added proudly: “I 
wrote it in two days. That’s fifty dollars a day.” 

He longed to read his stories to Ruth, but did not dare. 
He would wait till some were published, he decided, then 
she would understand what he had been working for. In 
the meantime he toiled on. Never had the spirit of adven-_, 
ture lured him more strongly than on this amazing ex- 
ploration of the realm of mind. He bought the text-books 
on physics and chemistry, and, along with his algebra, 
worked out problems and demonstrations. He took the 
laboratory proofs on faith, and his intense power of vision 
enabled him to see the reactions of chemicals more under- 
standingly than the average student saw them in the 
laboratory. Martin wandered on through the heavy 
pages, overwhelmed by the clews he was getting to the 
nature of things. He had accepted the world as the 
world, but now he was comprehending the organization 


96 MARTIN EDEN 


of it, the play and interplay of force and matter. Spon- 
taneous explanations of old matters were continually aris- 
ing in his mind. Levers and purchases fascinated him, 
and his mind roved backward to hand-spikes and blocks 
and tackles at sea. ‘The theory of navigation, which en- 
abled the ships to travel unerringly their courses over 
the pathless ocean, was made clear to him. The mys- 
teries of storm, and rain, and tide were revealed, and the 
reason for the existence of trade-winds made him wonder 
whether he had written his article on the northeast trade 
too soon. At any rate he knew he could write it better 
now. One afternoon he went out with Arthur to the 
University of California, and, with bated breath and a 
feeling of religious awe, went through the laboratories, 
saw demonstrations, and listened to a physics professor 
lecturing to his classes. 

But he did not neglect his writing. A stream of short 
stories flowed from his pen, and he branched out into the 
easier forms of verse —the kind he saw printed in the 
magazines—though he lost his head and wasted two weeks 
on a tragedy in blank verse, the swift rejection of which, 
by half a dozen magazines, dumfounded him. Then he 
discovered Henley and wrote a series of sea-poems on the 
model of “‘ Hospital Sketches.” They were simple poems, 
of light and color, and romance and adventure. ‘Sea 
Lyrics,” he called them, and he judged them to be the 
best work he had yet done. ‘There were thirty, and he 
completed them in a month, doing one a day after having 
_ done his regular day’s work on fiction, which day’s work 
_) was the equivalent to a week’s work of the average suc- 
- cessful writer. The toil meant nothing to him. It was 
not toil. He was finding speech, and all the beauty and 
wonder that had been pent for years behind his inar- 
ane lips was now pouring forth in a wild and virile 

ood. 

He showed the “Sea Lyrics” to no one, not even to the 
editors. He had become distrustful of editors. But it 
was not distrust that prevented him from submitting the 
“Lyrics.” ‘They were so beautiful to him that he was 


MARTIN EDEN 97 


impelled to save them to share with Ruth in some glori- 
ous, far-off time when he would dare to read to her what 
he had written. Against that time he kept them with 
him, reading them aloud, going over them until he knew 
them by heart. 

He lived every moment of his waking hours, and he 
lived in his sleep, his subjective mind rioting through 
his five hours of surcease and combining the thoughts and 
events of the day into grotesque and impossible marvels. 
In reality, he never rested, and a weaker body or a less 
firmly poised brain would have been prostrated in a 
general break-down. His late afternoon calls on Ruth 
were rarer now, for June was approaching, when she 
would take her degree and finish with the university. 
Bachelor of Arts! — when he thought of her degree, it 
seemed she fled beyond him faster than he could pursue. 

One afternoon a week she gave to him, and arriving 
late, he usually stayed for dinner and for music afterward. 
Those were his red-letter days. ‘The atmosphere of the 
house, in such contrast with that in which he lived, and 
the mere nearness to her, sent him forth each time with 
a firmer grip on his resolve to climb the heights. In spite , 
of the beauty in him, and the aching desire to create, it,/ 
was for her that he struggled. He was a lover first and 
always. All other things he subordinated to love. 
Greater than his adventure in the world of thought was 
his love-adventure. ‘The world itself was not so amazing 
because of the atoms and molecules that composed it ac- 
cording to the propulsions of irresistible force; what 
made it amazing was the fact that Ruth lived in it. She 
was the most amazing thing he had ever known, or 
dreamed, or guessed. 

But he was oppressed always by her remoteness. She 
was so far from him, and he did not know how to ap- 
proach her. He had been a success with girls and women 
im his own class; but he had never loved any of them, 
while he did love her, and besides, she was not merely 
of another class. His very love elevated her above all 
classes. She was a being apart, so far apart that he did 

H 


98 MARTIN EDEN 


not know how to draw near to her as a lover should draw 
near. It was true, as he acquired knowledge and 
language, that he was drawing nearer, talking her speech, 
discovering ideas and delights in common; but this did 
not satisfy his lover’s yearning. His lover’s imagination 
had made her holy, too holy, too spiritualized, to have any 
kinship with him in the flesh. It was his own love that 
thrust her from him and made her seem impossible for 
him. Love itself denied him the one thing that it desired. 

And then, one day, without warning, the gulf between 
them was bridged for a moment, and thereafter, though 
the gulf remained, it was ever narrower. ‘They had been 
eating cherries— great, luscious, black cherries with a juice 
of the color of dark wine. And later, as she read aloud to 
him from “ The Princess,” he chanced to notice the stain — 
of the cherries on her lips. For the moment her divinity 
was shattered. She was clay, after all, mere clay, subject 
to the common law of clay as his clay was subject, or any- 
body’s clay. Her lips were flesh like his, and cherries dyed 
them as cherries dyed his. And if so with her lips, then 
was it so with allof her. She was woman, all woman, just 
like any woman. It came upon him abruptly. It was a 
revelation that stunned him. It was as if he had seen the 
sun fall out of the sky, or had seen worshipped purity pol- 
luted. 

Then he realized the significance of it, and his heart be- 
gan pounding and challenging him to play the lover with 
this woman who was not a spirit from other worlds but a 
mere woman with lips a cherry could stain. He trembled 
at the audacity of his thought; but all his soul was sing- 
ing, and reason, in a triumphant pean, assured him he 
was right. Something of this change in him must have 
reached her, for she paused from her reading, looked up at 
him, and smiled. His eyes dropped from her blue eyes to 
her lips, and the sight of the stain maddened him. His 
arms all but flashed out to her and around her, in the way 
of his old careless life. She seemed to lean toward him, 
to wait, and all his will fought to hold him back. 

“ You were not following a word,” she pouted. 


MARTIN EDEN 99 


Then she laughed at him, delighting in his confusion, 
and as he looked into her frank eyes and knew that she 
had divined nothing of what he felt, he became abashed. 
He had indeed in thought dared too far. Of all the women 
he had known there was no woman who would not have 
guessed — save her. And she had not guessed. There 
was the difference. She was different. He was appalled 
by his own grossness, awed by her clear innocence, and he 
gazed again at her across the gulf. The bridge had broken 
down. 

But still the incident had brought him nearer. The 
memory of it persisted, and in the moments when he was 
most cast down, he dwelt upon it eagerly. The gulf was 
never again so wide. He had accomplished a distance 
vastly greater than a bachelorship of arts, or a dozen bach- 
elorships. She was pure, it was true, as he had never 
dreamed of purity ; but cherries stained her lips. She 
was subject to the laws of the universe just as inexorably 
as he was. She had to eat to live,and when she got her 
feet wet, she caught cold. But that was not the point. 
If she could feel hunger and thirst, and heat and cold, then 
could she feel love — and love fora man. Well, he wasa 
man. And why could he not be the man? “It’s up to 
me to make good,” he would murmur fervently. “I will» 
be the man. I will make myself the man. I will make 
good.” 


CHAPTER XII 


EARLY one evening, struggling with a sonnet that 
twisted all awry the beauty and thought that trailed in 
glow and vapor through his brain, Martin was called to 
the telephone. 

“It’s a lady’s voice,a fine lady’s,’ Mr. Higginbotham, 
who had called him, jeered. 

Martin went to the telephone in the corner of the room, 
and felt a wave of warmth rush through him as he heard 
Ruth’s voice. In his battle with the sonnet he had for- 
gotten her existence, and at the sound of her voice his 
love for her smote him like a sudden blow. And such a 
voice ! — delicate and sweet, like a strain of music heard 
far off and faint, or, better, like a bell of silver, a perfect 
tone, crystal-pure. No mere woman had a voice like that. 
There was something celestial about it, and it came from 
other worlds. He could scarcely hear what it said, so 
ravished was he, though he controlled his face, for he 
knew that Mr. Higginbotham’s ferret eyes were fixed upon 
him. 

It was not much that Ruth wanted to say — merely that 
Norman had been going to take her toa lecture that night, 
but that he had a headache, and she was so disappointed, 
and she had the tickets, and that if he had no other en- 
gagement, would he be good enough to take her ? 

Would he! He fought to suppress the eagerness in 
his voice. It was amazing. He had always seen her in 
her own house. And he had never dared to ask her to go 
anywhere with him. Quite irrelevantly, still at the tele- 
phone and talking with her, he felt an overpowering desire 
to die for her, and visions of heroic sacrifice shaped and 
dissolved in his whirling brain. He loved her so much, so 
terribly, so hopelessly. In that moment of mad happiness 

100 


MARTIN EDEN 101 


that she should go out with him, go to a lecture with him 
— with him, Martin Eden — she soared so far above him 
that there seemed nothing else for him to do than die for 
her. It was the only fit way in which he could express 
the tremendous and lofty emotion he felt for her. It was 
the sublime abnegation of true love that comes to all 
lovers, and it came to him there, at the telephone, in a 
whirlwind of fire and glory ; and to die for her, he felt, was 
to have lived and loved well. And he was only twenty- 
one, and he had never been in love before. 

His hand trembled as he hung up the receiver, and he 
was weak from the organ which had stirred him. His 
eyes were shining like an angel’s, and his face was trans- 
figured, purged of all earthly dross, and pure and holy. 

‘* Makin’ dates outside, eh?” his brother-in-law sneered. 
“ You know what that means. You'll be in the police 
court yet.” 

But Martin could not come down from the height. Not 
even the bestiality of the allusion could bring him back to 
earth. Anger and hurt were beneath him. He had seen 
a great vision and was as a god,and he could feel only 
profound and awful pity for this maggot of a man. He 
did not look at him, and though his eyes passed over him, 
he did not see him; and as in a dream he passed out of the 
room to dress. It was not until he had reached his own 
room and was tying his necktie that he became aware of a 
sound that lingered unpleasantly in his ears. On investi- 
gating this sound he identified it as the final snort of Ber- 
nard Higginbotham, which somehow had not penetrated 
to his brain before. 

As Ruth’s front door closed behind them and he came 
down the steps with her, he found himself greatly per- 
turbed. It was not unalloyed bliss, taking her to the lec- 
ture. He did not know what he ought to do. He had 
seen, on the streets, with persons of her class, that the 
women took the men’s arms. But then, again, he had 
seen them when they didn’t; and he wondered if it was 
only in the evening that arms were taken, or only between 
husbands and wives and relatives. 


102 MARTIN EDEN 


Just before he reached the sidewalk, he remembered 
Minnie. Minnie had always been a stickler. She had 
called him down the second time she walked out with 
him, because he had gone along on the inside, and she had 
laid the law down to him that a gentleman always walked on 
the outside — when he was with a lady. And Minnie had 
made a practice of kicking his heels, whenever they crossed 
from one side of the street to the other, to remind him to 
get over on the outside. He wondered where she had got 
that item of etiquette, and whether it had filtered down 
from above and was all right. 

It wouldn’t do any harm to try it, he decided, by the 
time they had reached the sidewalk; and he swung behind 
Ruth and took up his station on the outside. Then the 
other problem presented itself. Should he offer her his 
arm? He had never offered anybody his arm in his life. 
The girls he had known never took the fellows’ arms. For 
the first several times they walked freely, side by side, and 
after that it was arms around the waists, and heads against 
the fellows’ shoulders where the streets were unlighted. 
But this was different. She wasn’t that kind of a girl. 
He must do something. 

He crooked the arm next to her—crooked it very 
slightly and with secret tentativeness, not invitingly, but 
just casually, as though he was accustomed to walk that 
way. And then the wonderful thing happened. He felt 
her hand upon his arm. Delicious thrills ran through him 
at the contact, and for a few sweet moments it seemed that 
he had left the solid earth and was flying with her through 
the air. But he was soon back again, perturbed by a new 
complication. ‘They were crossing the street. This would 
put him on the inside. He should be on the outside. 
Should he therefore drop her arm and change over? And 
if he did so, would he have to repeat the manceuvre the next 
time? And the next? There was something wrong about 
it, and he resolved not to caper about and play the fool. 
Yet he was not satisfied with his conclusion, and when he 
found himself on the inside, he talked quickly and ear- 
nestly, making a show of being carried away by what he 


MARTIN EDEN 103 


was saying, so that, in case he was wrong in not changing 
sides, his enthusiasm would seem the cause for his careless- 
ness. 

As they crossed Broadway, he came face to face with a 
new problem. In the blaze of the electric lights, he saw 
Lizzie Connolly and her giggly friend. Only for an instant 
he hesitated, then his hand went up and his hat came off. 
He could not be disloyal to his kind, and it was to more 
than Lizzie Connolly that his hat was lifted. She nodded 
and looked at him boldly, not with soft and gentle eyes 
like Ruth’s, but with eyes that were handsome and hard, 
and that swept on past him to Ruth and itemized her face 
and dress and station. And he was aware that Ruth 
looked, too, with quick eyes that were timid and mild as 
a dove’s, but which saw, in a look that was a flutter on and 
past, the working-class girl in her cheap finery and under 
the strange hat that all working-class girls were wearing 
just then. 

“ What a pretty girl!” Ruth said a moment later. 

Martin could have blessed her, though he said : — 

“JT don’t know. I guess it’s all a matter of personal 
taste, but she doesn’t strike me as being particularly 
pretty.” 

“Why, there isn’t one woman in ten thousand with 
features as regular as hers. They are splendid. Her face 
is as clear-cut as a cameo. And her eyes are beautiful.” 

“Do you think so?” Martin queried absently, for to 
him there was only one beautiful woman in the world, and 
she was beside him, her hand upon his arm. 

“Dol think so? If that girl had proper opportunity 
to dress, Mr. Eden, and if she were taught how to carry 
herself, you would be fairly dazzled by her, and so would 
all men.” ; 

“She would have to be taught how to speak,” he com- 
mented, “or else most of the men wouldn’t understand 
her. I’m sure you couldn’t understand a quarter of what 
she said if she just spoke naturally.” 

‘“ Nonsense! You are as bad as Arthur when you try to 
make your point.” 


104 MARTIN EDEN 


*“ You forget how I talked when you first met me. I 
have learned a new language since then. Before that time 
I talked as that girl talks. Now I can manage to make 
myself understood sufficiently in your language to explain 
that you do not know that other girl’s language. And do 
you know why she carries herself the way she does? I 
think about such things now, though I never used to think: 
about them, and J am beginning to understand — much.” 
_ “But why does she ?” 

“She has worked long hours for years at machines. 
When one’s body is young, it is very pliable, and hard 
work will mould it like putty according to the nature of 
the work. Ican tell at a glance the trades of many work- 
ingmen I meet on the street. Look at me. Why am I 
rolling all about the shop? Because of the years I put in 
on the sea. If I’d put in the same years cow-punching, 
with my body young and pliable, I wouldn’t be rolling 
now, but I’d be bow-legged. And so with that girl. You 
noticed that her eyes were what I might call hard. She 
has never been sheltered. She has had to take care of her- 
self, and a young girl can’t take care of herself and keep 
her eyes soft and gentle like — like yours, for example.” 

“J think you are right,” Ruth said in a low voice. 
« And it is too bad. She is such a pretty girl.” 

He looked at her and saw her eyes luminous with pity. 
And then he remembered that he loved her and was lost 
in amazement at his fortune that permitted him to love 
her and to take her on his arm to a lecture. 

Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in 
the looking-glass, that night when he got back to his room. 
He gazed at himself long and curiously. Who are you? 
Whatare you? Where do you belong? You belong by 
rights to girls like Lizzie Connolly. You belong with the 
legions of toil, with all that is low, and vulgar, and un- 
beautiful. You belong with the oxen and the drudgeg, in 
dirty surroundings among smellsand stenches. There are 
the stale vegetables now. ‘Those potatoes are rotting. 
Smell them, damn you, smell them. And yet you dare to 
open the books, to listen to beautiful music, to learn to love 


MARTIN EDEN 105 


beautiful paintings, to speak good English, to think 
thoughts that none of your own kind thinks, to tear your- 
self away from the oxen and the Lizzie Connollys and to 
love a pale spirit of a woman who is a million miles be- 
yond you and who lives in the stars! Who are you? and 
what are you? damn you! And are you going to make 
ood? 

4 He shook his fist at himself in the glass, and sat down on 
the edge of the bed to dream for a space with wide eyes. 
Then he got out note-book and algebra and lost himself in 
quadratic equations, while the hours slipped by, and the 
stars dimmed, and the gray of dawn flooded against his 
window. 


CHAPTER XIII 


It was the knot of wordy socialists and working-class phi- 
losophers that held forth in the City Hall Park on warm 
afternoons that was responsible for the great discovery. 
Once or twice in the month, while riding through the park 
on his way to the library, Martin dismounted from his 
wheel and listened to the arguments, and each time he tore 
himself away reluctantly. The tone of discussion was 
much lower than at Mr. Morse’s table. The men were not 
grave and dignified. They lost their tempers easily and 
called one another names, while oaths and obscene allusions 
were frequent on their lips. Once or twice he had seen 
them come to blows. And yet, he knew not why, there 
seemed something vital about the stuff of these men’s 
thoughts. Their logomachy was far more stimulating to 
his intellect than the reserved and quiet dogmatism of Mr. 
Morse. ‘These men, who slaughtered English, gesticulated 
like lunatics, and fought one another’s ideas with primitive 
anger, seemed somehow to be more alive than Mr. Morse 
and his crony, Mr. Butler. 

Martin had heard Herbert Spencer quoted several times 
in the park, but one afternoon a disciple of Spencer’s 
appeared, a seedy tramp with a dirty coat buttoned tightly 
at the throat to conceal the absence of a shirt. Battle 
royal was waged, amid the smoking of many cigarettes and 
the expectoration of much tobacco-juice, wherein the tramp 
successfully held his own, even when a socialist workman 
sneered, “There is no god but the Unknowable, and Her- 
bert Spencer is his prophet.” Martin was puzzled as to 
what the discussion was about, but when he rode on to the 
library he carried with him a new-born interest in Herbert 
Spencer, and because of the frequency with which the 

106 


MARTIN EDEN 107 


tramp had mentioned “First Principles,” Martin drew out 
that volume. 

So the great discovery began. Once before he had tried 
Spencer, and choosing the “Principles of Psychology” to 
begin with, he had failed as abjectly as he had failed with 
Madam Blavatsky. There had been no understanding the 
book, and he had returned it unread. But this night, 
after algebra and physics, and an attempt at a sonnet, he 
got into bed and opened “First Principles.” Morning 
found him still reading. It was impossible for him to 
sleep. Nor did he write thatday. He lay on the bed till 
his body grew tired, when he tried the hard floor, reading 
on his back, the book held in the air above him, or changing 
from side to side. He sleptthat night, and did his writing 
next morning, and then the book tempted him and he fell, 
reading all afternoon, oblivious to everything and oblivious 
to the fact that that was the afternoon Ruth gave to him. 
His first consciousness of the immediate world about him 
was when Bernard Higginbotham jerked open the door 
and demanded to know if he thought they were running 
a restaurant. 

Martin Eden had been mastered by curiosity all his days. 
He wanted to know, and it was this desire that had sent 
him adventuring over the world. But he was now learn- 
ing from Spencer that he never had known, and that he 
never could have known had he continued his sailing and 
wandering forever. He had merely skimmed over the 
surface of things, observing detached phenomena, accumu- 
lating fragments of facts, making superficial little general- 
izations — and all and everything quite unrelated in a 
capricious and disorderly world of whim and chance. The 
mechanism of the flight of birds he had watched and 
reasoned about with understanding; but it had never 
entered his head to try to explain the process whereby 
birds, as organic flying mechanisms, had been developed. He 
had never dreamed there was such a process. That birds 
should have come to be, was unguessed. They always had 
been. They just happened. 

And as it was with birds, so had it been with everything. 
His ignorant and unprepared attempts at philosophy had 


108 MARTIN EDEN 


been fruitless. The medieval metaphysics of Kant had 
given him the key to nothing, and had served the sole pur- 
pose of making him doubt his own intellectual powers. In 
similar manner his attempt to study evolution had been 
confined to a hopelessly technical volume by Romanes. 
He had understood nothing, and the only idea he had 
gathered was that evolution was a dry-as-dust theory, of a 
lot of little men possessed of huge and unintelligible vocab- 
ularies. And now he learned that evolution was no mere 
theory but an accepted process of development; that 
scientists no longer disagreed about it, their only differ- 
ences being over the method of evolution. 

And here was the man Spencer, organizing all knowledge 
for him, reducing everything to unity, elaborating ultimate 
realities, and presenting to his startled gaze a universe so 
concrete of realization that it was like the model of a ship 
such as sailors make and put into glass bottles. There was 
no caprice, nochance. Allwaslaw. It was in obedience 
to law that the bird flew, and it was in obedience to the 
same law that fermenting slime had writhed and squirmed 
and put out legs and wings and become a bird. 

Martin had ascended from pitch to pitch of intellectual 
living, and here he was at a higher pitch than ever. All 
the hidden things were laying their secrets bare. He 
was drunken with comprehension. At night, asleep, he 
lived with the gods in colossal nightmare; and awake, in 
the day, he went around like a somnambulist, with absent 
stare, gazing upon the world he had just discovered. <At 
table he failed to hear the conversation about petty and 
ignoble things, his eager mind seeking out and following 
cause and effect in everything before him. In the meat 
on the platter he saw the shining sun and traced its 
energy back through all its transformations to its source a 
hundred million miles away, or traced its energy ahead to 
the moving muscles in his arms that enabled him to cut the 
meat, and to the brain wherewith he willed the muscles 
to move to cut the meat, until, with inward gaze, he saw 
the same sun shining in his brain. He was entranced by 
illumination, and did not hear the “ Bughouse,” whispered 


MARTIN EDEN 109 


by Jim, nor see the anxiety on his sister’s face, nor notice 
the rotary motion of Bernard Higginbotham’s finger, 
whereby he imparted the suggestion of wheels revolving 
in his brother-in-law’s head. 

What, in a way, most profoundly impressed Martin, 
was the correlation of knowledge—of all knowledge. 
He had been curious to know things, and whatever he ac- 
quired he had filed away in separate memory compart- 
ments in his brain. ‘Thus, on the subject of sailing he 
had an immense store. On the subject of woman he had 
a fairly large store. But these two subjects had been un- 
related. Between the two memory compartments there 
had been no connection. That, in the fabric of knowl- 
edge, there should be any connection whatever between a 
woman with hysterics and a schooner carrying a weather- 
helm or heaving to in a gale, would have struck him as 
ridiculous and impossible. But Herbert Spencer had 
shown him not only that it was not ridiculous, but that it 
was impossible for there to be no connection. All things 
were related to all other things from the farthermost star 
in the wastes of space to the myriads of atoms in the grain 
of sand under one’s foot. This new concept was a per- 
petual amazement to Martin, and he found himself en- 
gaged continually in tracing the relationship between all 
things under the sun and on the other side of the sun. 
He drew up lists of the most incongruous things and 
was unhappy until he succeeded in establishing kinship 
between them all — kinship between love, poetry, earth- 
quake, fire, rattlesnakes, rainbows, precious gems, mon- 
strosities, sunsets, the roaring of lions, illuminating gas, 
cannibalism, beauty, murder, lovers, fulcrums, and _ to- 
bacco. Thus, he unified the universe and held it up 
and looked at it, or wandered through its byways and 
alleys and jungles, not as a terrified traveller in the thick 
of mysteries seeking an unknown goal, but observing and 
charting and becoming familiar with all there was to 
know. And the mor he knew, the more passionately he 
admired the universe, and life, and his own life in the 
midst of it all. 


110 MARTIN EDEN 


“You fool!” he cried at his image in the looking-glass. 
“You wanted to write, and you tried to write, and you 
had nothing in you to write about. What did you 
have in you? —some childish notions, a few half-baked 
sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great black mass 
of ignorance, a heart filled to bursting with love, and an 
ambition as big as your love and as futile as your igno- 
rance. And you wanted to write! Why, you're just on 
the edge of beginning to get something in you to write 
about. You wanted to create beauty, but how could you 
when you knew nothing about the nature of beauty ? 
You wanted to write about life when you knew nothing 
of the essential characteristics of life. You wanted to 
write about the world and the scheme of existence when 
the world was a Chinese puzzle to you and all that you 
could have written would have been about what you did 
not know of the scheme of existence. But cheer up, 
Martin, my boy. You'll write yet. You know a little, a 
very little, and you’re on the right road now to know 
more. Some day, if you’re lucky, you may come pretty 
close to knowing all that may be known. ‘Then you will 
write.” 

He brought his great discovery to Ruth, sharing with 
her all his joy and wonder in it. But she did not seem to 
be so enthusiastic over it. She tacitly accepted it and, in 
a way, seemed aware of it from her own studies. It did 
not stir her deeply, as it did him, and he would have been 
surprised had he not reasoned it out that it was not new 
and fresh to heras it was to him. Arthur and Norman, 
he found, believed in evolution and had read Spencer, 
though it did not seem to have made any vital impression 
upon them, while the young fellow with the glasses and 
the mop of hair, Will Olney, sneered disagreeably at 
Spencer and repeated the epigram, “ There is no god but 
the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is his prophet.” 

. But Martin forgave him the sneer, for he had begun to 
discover that Olney was not in love with Ruth. Later, 
he was dumfounded to learn from various little happen- 
ings not only that Olney did not care for Ruth, but that 


MARTIN EDEN 111 


he had a positive dislike for her. Martin could not under- 
stand this. It was a bit of phenomena that he could not 
correlate with all the rest of the phenomena in the uni- 
verse. But nevertheless he felt sorry for the young fel- 
low because of the great lack in his nature that prevented 
him from a proper appreciation of Ruth’s fineness and 
beauty. They rode out into the hills several Sundays 
on their wheels, and Martin had ample opportunity to ob- 
serve the armed truce that existed between Ruth and 
Olney. The latter chummed with Norman, throwing 
Arthur and Martin into company with Ruth, for which 
Martin was duly grateful. 

Those Sundays were great days for Martin, greatest be- 
cause he was with Ruth, and great, also, because they 
were putting him more on a par with the young men of 
her class. In spite of their long years of disciplined edu- 


cation, he was finding himself their intellectual equal, and 7 


the hours spent with them in conversation was so much 
practice for him in the use of the grammar he had studied 
so hard. He had abandoned the etiquette books, falling 
back upon observation to show him the right things to do. 
Except when carried away by his enthusiasm, he was 
always on guard, keenly watchful of their actions and 
learning their little courtesies and refinements of conduct. 

The fact that Spencer was very little read was for some 
time a source of surprise to Martin. ‘“ Herbert Spencer,” 
said the man at the desk in the library, “oh, yes, a 
great mind.” But the man did not seem to know any- 
thing of the content of that great mind. One evening, 
at dinner, when Mr. Butler was there, Martin turned the 
conversation upon Spencer. Mr. Morse bitterly arraigned 
the English philosopher’s agnosticism, but confessed that 
he had not read *“ First Principles”; while Mr. Butler 
stated that he had no patience with Spencer, had never 
read a line of him, and had managed to get along quite 
well without him. Doubts arose in Martin’s mind, and 
had he been less strongly individual he would have ac- 
cepted the general opinion and given Herbert Spencer up. 
As it was, he found Spencer’s explanation of things con- 


112 MARTIN EDEN 


vincing ; and, as he phrased it to himself, to give up 
Spencer would be equivalent to a navigator throwing the 
compass and chronometer overboard. So Martin went on 
into a thorough study of evolution, mastering more and 
more the subject himself, and being convinced by the cor- 
roborative testimony of a thousand independent writers. 
The more he studied, the more vistas he caught of fields 
of knowledge yet unexplored, and the regret that days 
were only twenty-four hours long became a chronic com- 
plaint with him. 

One day, because the days were so short, he decided to 
give up algebra and geometry. Trigonometry he had not 
even attempted. ‘Then he cut chemistry from his study- 
list, retaining only physics. 

“T am not a specialist,’ he said, in defence, to Ruth. 
‘Nor am I going to try to be a specialist. ‘There are too 
many special fields for any one man, in a whole lifetime, 
to master a tithe of them. I must pursue general knowl- 
edge. When I need the work of specialists, I shall refer 
to their books.” 

“ But that is not like having the knowledge yourself,” 
she protested. 

“ But it is unnecessary to have it. We profit from the 
work of the specialists. That’s what they are for. 
When I came in, I noticed the chimney-sweeps at work. 
They’re specialists, and when they get done, you will en- 
joy clean chimneys without knowing anything about the 
construction of chimneys.” 

*¢ That’s far-fetched, I am afraid.” 

She looked at him curiously, and he felt a reproach in 
her gaze and manner. But he was convinced of the right- 
ness of his position. 

‘‘ All thinkers on general subjects, the greatest minds in 
the world, in fact, rely on the specialists. Herbert Spen- 
cer did that. He generalized upon the findings of thou- 
sands of investigators. He would have had to live a 
thousand lives in order to do it all himself. And so 
with Darwin. He took advantage of all that had been 
learned by the florists and cattle-breeders.” 


MARTIN EDEN 113 


“ You're right, Martin,” Olney said. ‘“ You know what 
you're after, and Ruth doesn’t. She doesn’t know what 
she is after for herself even. 

«¢__ Qh, yes,” Olney rushed on, heading off her objection, 
*T know you call it general culture. But it doesn’t mat- 
ter what you study if you want general culture. You can 
study French, or you can study German, or cut them both 
out and study Esperanto, you'll get the culture tone just 
the same. You can study Greek or Latin, too, for the 
same purpose, though it will never be any use to you. It 
will be culture, though. Why, Ruth studied Saxon, be- 
came clever in it, —that was two years ago,— and all that 
she remembers of it now is ‘ Whan that sweet Aprile with 
his schowers soote’ — isn’t that the way it goes? 

“ But it’s given you the culture tone just the same,” he 
laughed, again heading her off. “I know. We were in 
the same classes.” 

“ But you speak of culture as if it should be a means to 
something,” Ruth cried out. Her eyes were flashing, and 
in her cheeks were two spots of color. ‘Culture is the 
end in itself.” 

“ But that is not what Martin wants.” 

“ How do you know?” 

“ What do you want, Martin?” Olney demanded, turn- 
ing squarely upon him. 

Martin felt very uncomfortable, and looked entreaty at 
Ruth. 

“ Yes, what do you want?” Ruth asked. “That will 
settle it.” 

“ Yes, of course, I want culture,’ Martin faltered. “I 
love beauty, and culture will give me a finer and keener 
appreciation of beauty.” 

She nodded her head and looked triumph. 

“Rot, and you know it,’ was Olney’s comment. 
“ Martin’s after career, not culture. It just happens that 
culture, in his case, is incidental to career. If he wanted 
to be a chemist, culture would be unnecessary. Martin 
wants to write, but he’s afraid to say so because it will 
put you in the wrong. 
I 


114 MARTIN EDEN 


« And why does Martin want to write?” he went on. 
“Because he isn’t rolling in wealth. Why do you fill 
your head with Saxon and general culture? Because you 
don’t have to make your way in the world. Your father 
sees to that. He buys your clothes for you, and all the 
rest. What rotten good is our education, yours and mine 
and Arthur’s and Norman’s? We're soaked in general 
culture, and if our daddies went broke to-day, we’d be 
falling down to-morrow on teachers’ examinations. The 
best job you could get, Ruth, would be a country school 
or music teacher in a girls’ boarding-school.” 

“And pray what would you do?” she asked. 

“ Not a blessed thing. I could earn a dollar and a half 
a day, common labor, and I might get in as instructor in 
Hanley’s cramming joint —I say might, mind you, and I 
might be chucked out at the end of the week for sheer 
inability.” 

Martin followed the discussion closely, and while he 
was convinced that Olney was right, he resented the 
rather cavalier treatment he accorded Ruth. <A new con- 
ception of love formed in his mind as he listened. Reason 
had nothing to do with love. It mattered not whether 
the woman he loved reasoned correctly or incorrectly. 
Love was above reason. If it just happened that she did 
not fully appreciate his necessity for a career, that did not 
make her a bit less lovable. She was all lovable, and 
what she thought had nothing to do with her lovableness. 

“What’s that?” he replied to a question from Olney 
that broke in upon his train of thought. 

“T was saying that I hoped you wouldn’t be fool 
enough to tackle Latin.” 

*¢ But Latin is more than culture,” Ruth broke in. “It 
is equipment.” 

“ Well, are you going to tackle it ?” Olney persisted. 

Martin was sore beset. He could see that Ruth was 
hanging eagerly upon his answer. 

“J am afraid I won’t have time,” he said finally. “I'd 
like to, but I won’t have time.” 

“You see, Martin’s not seeking culture,” Olney ex- 
ulted.. “ He’s trying to get somewhere, to do something.” 


MARTIN EDEN 115 


“Oh, but it’s mental training. It’s mind discipline. 
It’s what makes disciplined minds.” Ruth looked ex- 
pectantly at Martin, as if waiting for him to change his 
judgment. ‘You know, the foot-ball players have to 
train before the big game. And that is what Latin does 
for the thinker. It trains.” 

“ Rot and bosh! That’s what they told us when we 
were kids. But there is one thing they didn’t tell us 
then. They let us find it out for ourselves afterwards.” 
Olney paused for effect, then added, “ And what they 
didn’t tell us was that every gentleman should have 
studied Latin, but that no gentleman should know 
Latin.” 

“Now that’s unfair,” Ruth cried. “I knew you were 
turning the conversation just in order to get off some- 
thing.” 

“It’s clever all right,” was the retort, “but it’s fair, 
too. The only men who know their Latin are the apothe- 
caries, the lawyers, and the Latin professors. And if 
Martin wants to be one of them, I miss my guess. But 
what’s all that got to do with Herbert Spencer anyway ? 
Martin’s just discovered Spencer, and he’s wild over him. 
Why? Because Spencer is taking him somewhere. Spen- 
cer couldn’t take me anywhere, nor you. We haven’t 
got anywhere to go. Youll get married some day, 
and I'll have nothing to do but keep track of the lawyers 
and business agents who will take care of the money my 
father’s-going to leave me.” 

Olney got up to go, but turned at the door and deliv- 
ered a parting shot. 

“You leave Martin alone, Ruth. He knows what’s 
best for himself. Look at what he’s done already. He 
makes me sick sometimes, sick and ashamed of myself. 
He knows more now about the world, and life, and man’s 
place, and all the rest, than Arthur, or Norman, or I, or 
you, too, for that matter, and in spite of all our Latin, 
and French, and Saxon, and culture.” 

*“ But Ruth is my teacher,” Martin answered chival- 
rously. “She is responsible for what little I have learned.” 


116 MARTIN EDEN 


“ Rats!” Olney looked at Ruth, and his expression was 
malicious. ‘I suppose you'll be telling me next that you 
read Spencer on her recommendation— only you didn’t. 
And she doesn’t know anything more about Darwin and 
evolution than I do about King Solomon’s mines. What’s 
that jawbreaker definition about something or other, of © 
Spencer’s, that you sprang on us the other day —that 
indefinite, incoherent homogeneity thing? Spring it on 
her, and see if she understands a word of it. That isn’t 
culture, you see. Well, tra la, and if you tackle Latin, 
Martin, I won’t have any respect for you.” 

And all the while, interested in the discussion, Martin 
had been aware of an irk in it as well. It was about 
studies and lessons, dealing with the rudiments of knowl- 
edge, and the schoolboyish tone of it conflicted with the 
big things that were stirring in him — with the grip upon 
life that was even then crooking his fingers like eagle’s 
talons, with the cosmic thrills that made him ache, and 
with the inchoate consciousness of mastery of it all. He 
likened himself to a poet, wrecked on the shores of a 


/ strange land, filled with power of beauty, stumbling and 


stammering and vainly trying to sing in the rough, bar- 
baric tongue of his brethren in the new land. And so 
with him. He was alive, painfully alive, to the great 
universal things, and yet he was compelled to potter and 
grope among schoolboy topics and debate whether or not 
he should study Latin. 

“ What in hell has Latin to do with it?” he demanded 
before his mirror that night. ‘I wish dead people would 


_™ stay dead. Why should I and the beauty in me be ruled 


by the dead? Beauty is alive andeverlasting. Languages 
come and go. They are the dust of the dead.” 

And his next thought was that he had been phrasing 
his ideas very well, and he went to bed wondering why he 
could not talk in similar fashion when he was with Ruth. 
He was only a schoolboy, with a schoolboy’s tongue, when 
he was in her presence. 

“Give me time,” he said aloud. “ Only give me time.” 

Time! Time! Time! was his unending plaint. 


CHAPTER XIV 


It was not because of Olney, but in spite of Ruth, and 
his love for Ruth, that he finally decided not to take up 
Latin. His money meant time. ‘There was so much that 
was more important than Latin, so many studies that clam- 
ored with imperious voices. Andhemust write. He must 
earn money. He had had no acceptances. Twoscore of 

manuscripts were travelling the endless round of the maga- 
zines. How did the others doit? He spent long hours 
in the free reading-room, going over what others had 
written, studying their work eagerly and critically, com- 
paring it with his own, and wondering, wondering, about 
the secret trick they had discovered which enabled them 
to sell their work. 

He was amazed at the immense amount of printed stuff 
that was dead. No light, no life, no color, was shot 
through it. ‘There was no breath of life in it, and yet it 
sold, at two cents a word, twenty dollars a thousand — the 
newspaper clipping had said so. He was puzzled by 
countless short stories, written lightly and cleverly he 
confessed, but without vitality or reality. Life was so 
strange and wonderful, filled with an immensity of prob- 
lems, of dreams, and of heroic toils, and_yet these stories 
dealt only with the commonplaces of life. He felt the 
stress and strain of life, its fevers and sweats and wild 
insurgences —surely this was the stuff to write about ! 
He wanted to glorify the leaders of forlorn hopes, the mad 
lovers, the giants that fought under stress and strain, amid 
terror and tragedy, making life crackle with the strength 
of their endeavor. And yet the magazine short stories 
seemed. intent.on-glorifying. the “Mr-Butlers, the sordid 
dollar-chasers, and the commonplace little love affairs of 
commonplace little men and women. Was it because the 
editors of the magazines were commonplace? he demanded. 

117 


118 MARTIN EDEN 


Or were they afraid of life, these writers and editors and 
readers ? 

But his chief trouble was that he did not know any 
editors or writers. And not merely did he not know any 
writers, but he did not know anybody who had ever at- 
tempted to write. There was nobody to tell him, to hint 
to him, to give him the least word of advice. He began 
to doubt that editors were real men. They seemed cogs 
ina machine. That was what it was, a machine. He 
poured his soul into stories, articles, and poems, and in- 
trusted them to the machine. He folded them just so, put 
the proper stamps inside the long envelope along with the 
manuscript, sealed the envelope, put more stamps outside, 
and dropped it into the mail-box. It travelled across the 
continent, and after a certain lapse of time the postman 
returned him the manuscript in another long envelope, 
on the outside of which were the stamps he had en- 
closed. ‘There was no human editor at the other end, but 
amere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the 
manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the 
stamps. It was like the slot machines wherein one 
dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery 
had delivered to him a stick of chewing-gum or a tablet 
of chocolate. It depended upon which slot one dropped 
the penny in, whether he got chocolate or gum. And so 
with the editorial machine. One slot brought checks and 
the other brought rejection slips. So far he had found 
only the latter slot. 

It was the rejection slips that completed the horrible 
machinelikeness of the process. These slips were printed 
in stereotyped forms and he had received hundreds of 
them —as many as a dozen or more on each of his earlier 
manuscripts. If he had received one line, one personal 
line, along with one rejection of all his rejections, he 
would have been cheered. But not one editor had given 
that proof of existence. And he could conclude only that 
there were no warm human men at the other end, only 
mere cogs, well oiled and running beautifully in the 
machine. 


MARTIN EDEN 119 


He was a good fighter, whole-souled and stubborn, and 
he would have been content to continue feeding the ma- 
chine for years; but he was bleeding to death, and not 
years but weeks would determine the fight. Each week 
his board bill brought him nearer destruction, while the 
postage on forty manuscripts bled him almost as severely. 
He no longer bought books, and he economized in petty 
ways and sought to delay the inevitable end; though he 
did not know how to economize, and brought the end 
nearer by a week when he gave his sister Marian five 
dollars for a dress. 

He struggled in the dark, without advice, without 
encouragement, and in the teeth of discouragement. Even 
Gertrude was beginning to look askance. At first she had 
tolerated with sisterly fondness what she conceived to be 
his foolishness; but now, out of sisterly solicitude, she 
grew anxious. ‘To her it seemed that his foolishness was 
becoming a madness. Martin knew this and suffered more 
keenly from it than from the open and nagging contempt 
of Bernard Higginbotham. Martin had faith in himself, 
but he was alone in this faith. Not even Ruth had faith. 
She had wanted him to devote himself to study, and, 
though she had not openly disapproved of his writing, 
she had never approved. 

He had never offered to show her his work. A fas- 
tidious delicacy had prevented him. Besides, she had 
been studying heavily at the university, and he felt 
averse to robbing her of her time. But when she had 
taken her degree, she asked him herself to let her see some- 
thing of what he had been doing. Martin was elated and 
diffident. Here was a judge. She was a bachelor of arts. 
She had studied literature under skilled instructors. Per- 
haps the editors were capable judges, too. But she would — 
be different from them. She would not hand him a 
stereotyped rejection slip, nor would she inform him that 
lack of preference for his work did not necessarily imply 
lack of merit in his work. She would talk, a warm human 
being, in her quick, bright way, and, most important of all, 
she would catch glimpses of the real Martin Eden. In his 


120 MARTIN EDEN 


work she would discern what his heart and soul were like, 
and she would come to understand something, a little 
something, of the stuff of his dreams and the strength of 
his power. 

Martin gathered together a number of carbon copies of 
his short stories, hesitated a moment, then added his “Sea 
Lyrics.” They mounted their wheels on a late June after- 
noon and rode for the hills. It was the second time he 
had been out with her alone, and as they rode along 
through the balmy warmth, just chilled by the sea-breeze 
to refreshing coolness, he was profoundly impressed by 
the fact that it was a very beautiful and well-ordered 
world and that it was good to be alive and to love. They 
left their wheels by the roadside and climbed to the brown 
top of an open knoll where the sunburnt grass breathed a 
harvest breath of dry sweetness and content. 

‘Its work is done,” Martin said, as they seated them- 
selves, she upon his coat, and he sprawling close to the 
warm earth. He sniffed the sweetness of the tawny grass, 
which entered his brain and set his thoughts whirling on 
from the particular to the universal. ‘It has achieved its 
reason for existence,” he went on, patting the dry grass 
affectionately. ‘It quickened with ambition under the 
dreary downpour of last winter, fought the violent early 
spring, flowered, and lured the insects and the bees, scat- 
tered its seeds, squared itself with its duty and the world, 
and —” 

‘“ Why do you always look at things with such dread- 
fully practical eyes?” she interrupted. 

‘“‘ Because I’ve been studying evolution, I guess. It’s 
vere recently that I got my eyesight, if the truth were 
told.” 

“But it seems to me you lose sight of beauty by being 
so practical, that you destroy beauty like the boys who 
catch butterflies and rub the down off their beautiful 
wings.” 

He shook his head. 

‘“ Beauty has significance, but I never knew its signifi- 
cance before. I just accepted beauty as something mean- 


MARTIN EDEN 121 


ingless, as something that was just beautiful without 
rhyme or reason. I did not know anything about beauty. 
But now I know, or, rather, am just beginning to know. 
This grass is more beautiful to me now that I know why 
it is grass, and all the hidden chemistry of sun and rain 
and earth that makes it become grass. Why, there is 
romance in the life-history of any grass, yes, and adven- 
ture, too. The very thought of it stirs me. When I think 


of the play of force and matter, and all the tremendous 


struggle of it, I feel as if I could write an epic on the 
grass.” | 

“ How well you talk,” she said absently, and he noted 
that she was looking at him in a searching way. 

He was all confusion and embarrassment on the instant, 
the blood flushing red on his neck and brow. 

“ | hope I am learning to talk,” he stammered. “ There 
seems to be so much in me I want to say. But it is all so 
big. I can’t find ways to say what is really in me. Some- 
times it seems to me that all the world, all life, everything, 
had taken up residence inside of me and was clamoring for 
me to be the spokesman. I feel—oh, I can’t describe it 
—I feel the bigness of it, but when I speak, I babble like 
a little child. It is a great task to transmute feeling and 
sensation into speech, written or spoken, that will, in turn, 
in him who reads or listens, transmute itself back into the 
selfsame feeling and sensation. It is a lordly task. See, 
I bury my face in the grass, and the breath I draw in 
through my nostrils sets me quivering with a thousand 
thoughts and fancies. Itisa breath of the universe I have 
breathed. I know song and laughter, and success and 
pain, and struggle and death; and I see visions that arise 
in my brain somehow out of the scent of the grass, and I 
would like to tell them to you, to the world. But how 
can 1? My tongue is tied. I have tried, by the spoken 
word, just now, to describe to you the effect on me of the 
scent of the grass. But I have not succeeded. I have no 
more than hinted in awkward speech. My words seem 
gibberish tome. And yet I am stifled with desire to tell. 
Oh ! —” he threw up his hands with a despairing gesture 


122 MARTIN EDEN 


—‘“it is impossible! It is not understandable! It is 
incommunicable ! ”’ 

“But you do talk well,” she insisted. “Just think how 
you have improved in the short time I have known you. 
Mr. Butler is a noted public speaker. He is ilways asked 
by the State Committee to go out on stump during cam- 
paign. Yet you talked just as well as he the other night 
at dinner. Only he wasmore controlled. You get too ex- 
cited ; but you will get over that with practice. Why, you 
would make a good public speaker. You can go far—if 
you want to. You are masterly. You can lead men, I 
am sure, and there is no reason why you should not suc- 
ceed at anything you set your hand to, just as you have 
succeeded with grammar. You would makea good lawyer. 
Youshould shine in politics. There is nothing to prevent 
you from making as great asuccess as Mr. Butler has made. 
And minus the dyspepsia,” she added with a smile. 

They talked on; she, in her gently persistent way, 
returning always to the need of thorough grounding in edu- 
cation and to the advantages of Latinas part of the founda- 
tion for any career. She drew her ideal of the successful 
man, and it was largely in her father’s image, with a few 
unmistakable lines and touches of color from the image 
of Mr. Butler. He listened eagerly, with receptive ears, 
lying on his back and looking up and joying in each move- 
ment of her lips as she talked. But his brain was not 
receptive. ‘There was nothing alluring in the pictures 
she drew, and he was aware of a dull pain of disappoint- 
ment and of a sharper ache of love for her. In all she 
said there was no mention of his writing, and the manu- 
scripts he had brought to read lay neglected on the 
ground. 

At last, in a pause, he glanced at the sun, measured its 
height above the horizon, and suggested his manuscripts 
by picking them up. 

“J had forgotten,” she said quickly. “And I am so 
anxious to hear.” ; 

He read to her a story, one that he flattered himself was 
among his very best. He called it “The Wine of Life,” 


MARTIN EDEN 123 


and the wine of it, that had stolen into his brain when he 
wrote it, stole into his brain now as he read it. There was 
a certain magic in the original conception, and he had 
adorned it with more magic of phrase and touch. All the 
old fire and passion with which he had written it were re- 
born in him, and he was swayed and swept away so that 
he was blind and deaf to the faults of it. But it was not 
so with Ruth. Her trained ear detected the weaknesses 
and exaggerations, the overemphasis of the tyro, and she 
was instantly aware each time the sentence-rhythm tripped 
and faltered. She scarcely noted the rhythm otherwise, 
except when it became too pompous, at which moments 
she was disagreeably impressed with its amateurishness. 
That was her final judgment on the story as a whole — 
amateurish, though she did not tell him so. Instead, when 
he had done, she pointed out the minor flaws and said that 
she liked the story. 

But he was disappointed. Her criticism was just. He 
acknowledged that, but he had a feeling that he was not 
sharing his work with her for the purpose of schoolroom 
correction. The details did not matter. They could take 
care of themselves. He could mend them, he could learn 
to mend them. Out of life he had captured something 
big and attempted to imprison it in the story. It was the 
big thing out of life he had read to her, not sentence-struc- 
ture and semicolons. He wanted her to feel with him this 
big thing that was his, that he had seen with his own eyes, 
grappled with his own brain, and placed there on the page 
with his own hands in printed words. Well, he had failed, 
was his secret decision. Perhaps the editors were right. 
He had felt the big thing, but he had failed to transmute 
it. He concealed his disappointment, and joined so easily 
with her in her criticism that she did not realize that deep 
down in him was running a strong undercurrent of disa- 
greement. 

“This next thing I’ve called‘ The Pot’,” he said, unfold- 
ing the manuscript. “It has been refused by four or 
five magazines now, but still I think it is good. In fact, I 
don’t know what to think of it, except that Pve caught some- 


124 MARTIN EDEN 


thing there. Maybe it won’t affect you as it does me. 
It’s a short thing — only two thousand words.” 

‘‘How dreadful!” she cried, when he had finished. “It 
is horrible, unutterably horrible!” 

He noted her pale face, her eyes wide and tense, and 
her clenched hands, with secret satisfaction. He had suc- 
ceeded. He had communicated the stuff of fancy and 
feeling from out of his brain. It had struck home. No 
matter whether she liked it or not, it had gripped her and 
mastered her, made hersit there and listen and forget details. 

“Tt is life,” he said, “and life is not always beautiful. 
And yet, perhaps because Iam strangely made, I find some- 
thing beautiful there. It seems to me that the beauty is 
tenfold enhanced because it is there —” 

‘*But why couldn’t the poor woman—.” she broke in 
disconnectedly. ‘Then she left the revolt of her thought 
unexpressed to cry out: “Oh! Itisdegrading! It is not 
nice! It is nasty!” 

For the moment it seemed to him that his heart stood 
still. Masty/ He had never dreamed it. He had not 
meant it. The whole sketch stood before him in letters 
of fire, and in such blaze of illumination he sought vainly 
for nastiness. ‘Then his heart began to beat again. He 
was not guilty. : 

“Why didn’t you select a nice subject?” she was say- 
ing. ‘We know there are nasty things in the world, but 
that is no reason —”’ 

She talked on in her indignant strain, but he was not 
following her. He was smiling to himself as he looked up 
into her virginal face, so innocent, so penetratingly inno- 
cent, that its purity seemed always to enter into him, 
driving out of him all drossand bathing him in some ethe- 
real effulgence that was as cool and soft and velvety as 
starshine. We know there are nasty things in the world! 
He cuddled to him the notion of her knowing, and chuckled 
over it as a love joke. The next moment, in a flashing 
vision of multitudinous detail, he sighted the whole sea of 
life’s nastiness that he had known and voyaged over and 
through, and he forgave her for not understanding the 


MARTIN EDEN 125 
story. It was through no fault of hers that she could not 
understand. Hethanked God that she had been born and 
sheltered to such innocence. But he knew life, its foul- 
ness as well as its fairness, its greatness in spite of the 
slime that infested it, and by God he was going to have 
his say on it to the world. Saints in heaven — how could 
they be anything but fair and pure? No praise to them. 
But saints in slime—ah, that was the everlasting wonder! 
That was what made life worth while. To see moral 
grandeur rising out of cesspools of iniquity; to rise himself 
and first glimpse beauty, faint and far, through mud-drip- 
ping eyes; to see out of weakness, and frailty, and vicious- 
ness, and all abysmal brutishness, arising strength, and 
truth, and high spiritual endowment — 

He caught a stray sequence of sentences she was 
uttering. 

“The tone of it all is low. And there is so much that 
is high. ‘Take ‘In Memoriam.’” 

He was impelled to suggest ‘* Locksley Hall,” and would 
have done so, had not his vision gripped him again and 
left him staring at her, the female of his kind, who, out of 
the primordial ferment, creeping and crawling up the vast 
ladder of life fora thousand thousand centuries, had emerged 
on the topmost rung, having, become one Ruth, pure, and 
fair, and divine, and with power to make him know love, 
and to aspire toward purity, and to desire to taste divinity 
—him, Martin Eden, who, too, had come up in some amaz- 
ing fashion from out of the ruckand the mire and the 
countless mistakes and abortions of unending creation. 
There was the romance, and the wonder, and the glory. 
There was the stuff to write, if he could only find 
speech. Saints in heaven !— They were only saints and 
could not help themselves. But he was a man. 

“You have strength,” he could hear her saying, “ but 
it is untutored strength.” 

“Like a bull in a china shop,” he suggested, and won 
a smile. | 

“And you must develop discrimination. You must 
consult taste, and fineness, and tone.’ 


126 MARTIN EDEN 


‘‘T dare too much,” he muttered. 

She smiled approbation, and settled herself to listen to 
another story. 

“T don’t know what you’ll make of this,” he said apolo- 
getically. ‘It’s afunny thing. I’m afraid I got beyond 
my depth in it, but my intentions were good. Don’t bother 
about the little features of it. Just see if you catch the 
feel of the big thing in it. It is big, and it is true, 
though the chance is large that I have failed to make it 
intelligible.” 

He read, and as he read he watched her. At last he 
had reached her, he thought. She sat without movement, 
her eyes steadfast upon him, scarcely breathing, caught 
up and out of herself, he thought, by the witchery of the 
thing he had created. He had entitled the story ‘“ Adven- 
ture,” and it was the apotheosis of adventure — not of 
the adventure of the story-books, but of real adventure, 
the savage taskmaster, awful of punishment and awful of 
reward, faithless and whimsical, demanding terrible pa- 
tience and heartbreaking days and nights of toil, offering 
the blazing sunlight glory or dark death at the end of 
thirst and famine or of the long drag and monstrous 
delirium of rotting fever, through blood and sweat and 
stinging insects leading up by long chains of petty and 
ignoble contacts to royal culminations and lordly achieve- 
ments. 

It was this, all of it, and more, that he had put into his 
story, and it was this, he believed, that warmed her as 
she sat and listened. Her eyes were wide, color was in 
her pale cheeks, and before he finished it seemed to him 
that she was almost panting. Truly, she was warmed; 
but she was warmed, not by the story, but by him. She 
did not think much of the story; it was Martin’s intensity 
of power, the old excess of strength that seemed to pour 
from his body and on and over her. The paradox of it 
was that it was the story itself that was freighted with 
his power, that was the channel, for the time being, 
through which his strength poured out to her. She was 
aware only of the strength, and not of the medium, and 


MARTIN EDEN 127 


when she seeraed most carried away by what he had writ- 
ten, in reality she had been carried away by something 
quite foreign to it— by a thought, terrible and perilous, 
that had formed itself unsummoned in her brain. She 
had caught herself wondering what marriage was like, 
and the becoming conscious of the waywardness and ar- 
dor of the thought had terrified her. It was unmaidenly. 
It was not like her. She had never been tormented by 
womanhood, and she had lived in a dreamland of Tenny- 
sonian poesy, dense even to the full significance of that 
delicate master’s delicate allusions to the grossnesses that 
intrude upon the relations of queens and knights. She 
had been asleep, always, and now life was thundering im- 
peratively at all her doors. Mentally she was in a panic 
to shoot the bolts and drop the bars into place, while 
wanton instincts urged her to throw wide her portals and 
bid the deliciously strange visitor to enter in. 

Martin waited with satisfaction for her verdict. He 
had no doubt of what it would be, and he was astounded 
when he heard her say : — 

“Tt is beautiful.” 

“Tt zs beautiful,” she repeated, with emphasis, after a 
pause. 

Of course it was beautiful; but there was something 
more than mere beauty in it, something more stingingly 
splendid which had made beauty its handmaiden. He 
sprawled silently on the ground, watching the grisly form 
of a great doubt rising before him. He had failed. He 
was inarticulate. He had seen one of the greatest things 
in the world, and he had not expressed it. 

“What did you think of the—” He hesitated, abashed 
at his first attempt to use a strange word. ‘Of the mo- 
tif?” he asked. 

“It was confused,” she answered. ‘That is my only 
criticism in the large way. I followed the story, but 
there seemed so much else. It is too wordy. You clog 
the action by introducing so much extraneous material.”’ 

“That was the major motif,” he hurriedly explained, ° 
“the big underrunning motif, the cosmic and universal 


128 MARTIN EDEN 


thing. I tried to make it keep time with the story itself, 
which was only superficial after all. I was on the right 
scent, but I guess I did it badly. I did not succeed in 
suggesting what I was driving at. But I’ll learn in 
time.” 

She did not follow him. ‘She was a bachelor of arts, 
but he had gone beyond her limitations. This she did 
not comprehend, attributing her incomprehension to his 
incoherence. 

‘You were too voluble,” she said. ‘ But it was beau- 
tiful, in places.” 

He heard her voice as from far off, for he was debating 
whether he would read her the “Sea Lyrics.”” He lay in 
dull despair, while she watched him searchingly, ponder- 
ing again upon unsummoned and wayward thoughts of 
marriage. 

“You want to be famous?” she asked abruptly. 

“ Yes, a little bit,” he confessed. ‘That is part of the 


/adventure. It is not the being famous, but the process of 


becoming so, that counts. And after all, to be famous 
would be, for me, only a means to something else. I 
want to be famous very much, for that pater, and for 
that reason.’ 

‘Hor your sake,” he wanted to add, nad might have 
added had she proved enthusiastic over what he had read 
to her. 

But she was too busy in her mind, carving out a career 
for him that would at least be possible, to ask what the 
ultimate something was which he had hinted at. There 
was no career for him in literature. Of that she was con- 
vinced. He had proved it to-day, with his amateurish 
and sophomoric productions. He could talk well, but he 
was incapable of expressing himself in a literary way. 
She compared Tennyson, and Browning, and her favorite 
prose masters with him, and to his hopeless discredit. Yet 
she did not tell him her whole mind. Her strange inter- 
est in him led her to temporize. His desire to write was, 
after all, a little weakness which he would grow out of in 
time. Then he would devote himself to the more serious 


MARTIN EDEN 129 


affairs of life. And he would succeed, too. She knew 
that. He was so strong that he could not fail—if only 
he would drop writing. 

“JT wish you would show me all you write, Mr. Eden,” 
she said. 

He flushed with pleasure. She was interested, that 
much was sure. And at least she had not given him a 
rejection slip. She had called certain portions of his 
work beautiful, and that was the first encouragement he 
had ever received from any one. 

“JY will,” he said passionately. ‘And I promise you, 
Miss Morse, that I will make good. I have come far, I 
know that; and I have far to go, and I will cover it if I 
have to do it on my hands and knees.” He held up a 
bunch of manuscript. ‘ Here are the ‘Sea Lyrics.” When 
you get home, I’ll turn them over to you to read at your 
leisure. And you must be sure to tell me just what you 
think of them. What I need, you know, above all things, 
is criticism. And do, please, be frank with me.” 

‘“T will be perfectly frank,” she promised, with an 
uneasy conviction that she had not been frank with him 
and with a doubt if she could be quite frank with him the 
next time. 


CHAPTER XV 


“ THE first battle, fought and finished,” Martin said to 
the looking-glass ten days later. “But there will be a 
second battle, and a third battle, and battles to the end of 
time, unless — ”’ 

He had not finished the sentence, but looked about the 
mean little room and let his eyes dwell sadly upon a heap 
of returned manuscripts, still in their long envelopes, 
which lay in a corner on the floor. He had no stamps 
with which to continue them on their travels, and for a 
week they had been piling up. More of them would come 
in on the morrow, and on the next day, and the next, 
till they were allin. And he would be unable to start 
them out again. He was a month’s rent behind on the 
type-writer, which he could not pay, having barely 
enough for the week’s board which was due and for the 
employment office fees. 

He sat down and regarded the table thoughtfully. 
There were ink stains upon it, and he suddenly discovered 
that he was fond of it. 

“Dear old table,” he said, “I’ve spent some happy 
hours with you, and you’ve been a pretty good friend 
when all is said and done. You never turned me down, 
never passed me out a reward-of-unmerit rejection slip, 
never complained about working overtime.” 

He dropped his arms upon the table and buried his 
face in them. His throat was aching, and he wanted to 
ery. It reminded him of his first fight, when he was six 
years old, when he punched away with the tears running 
down his cheeks while the other boy, two years his elder, 
had beaten and pounded him into exhaustion. He saw 
the ring of boys, howling like barbarians as he went down 

130 


MARTIN EDEN 131 


at last, writhing in the throes of nausea, the blood stream- 
ing from his nose and the tears from his bruised eyes. 

‘Poor little shaver,” he murmured. ‘“ And you’re just 
as badly licked now. Youw’re beaten to a pulp. You're 
down and out.” 

But the vision of that first fight still lingered under his 
eyelids, and as he watched he saw it dissolve and reshape 
into the series of fights which had followed. Six months 
later Cheese-Face (that was the boy) had whipped him 
again. But he had blacked Cheese-Face’s eye that time. 
That was going some. He saw them all, fight after fight, 
himself always whipped and Cheese-Face exulting over 
him. But he had never run away. He felt strengthened 
by the memory of that. Hel d always stayed and taken 
his medicine. Cheese-Face! 1) ¢en a little fiend at fight- 
ing, and had never once sh v~ ‘nercy to him. But he 
had stayed! He had stayed wi . it! 

Next, he saw a narrow alley, between ramshackle frame 
buildings. ‘The end of the al’ y was blocked by a one- 
story brick building, out of which issued the rhythmic 
thunder of the presses, running off the first edition of the 
Enquirer. He was eleven, and Cheese-Face was thir- 
teen, and they both carried the Enquirer. That was 
why they were there, waiting for their papers. And, of 
course, Cheese-Face had picked on him again, and there 
was another fight that was indeterminate, because at 
quarter to four the door of the press-room was thrown open 
and the gang of boys crowded in to fold their papers. 

“Tl lick you to-morrow,” he heard Cheese-Face prom- 
ise; and he heard his own voice, piping and trembling 
with unshed tears, agreeing to be there on the morrow. 

And he had come there the next day, hurrying from 
school to be there first, and beating Cheese-Face by two 
minutes. The other boys said he was all right, and gave 
him advice, pointing out his faults as a scrapper and 
promising him victory if he carried out their instructions. 
The same boys gave Cheese-Face advice, too. How they 
had enjoyed the fight! He paused in his recollections 
long enough to envy them the spectacle he and Cheese- 


132 MARTIN EDEN 


Face had put up. Then the fight was on, and it went on, 
without rounds, for thirty minutes, until the press-room 
door was opened. | 

He watched the youthful apparition of himself, day 
after day, hurrying from school to the Hnquirer alley. 
He could not walk very fast. He was stiff and lame from 
the incessant fighting. His forearms were black and 
blue from wrist to elbow, what of the countless blows he 
had warded off, and here and there the tortured flesh was 
beginning to fester. His head and arms and shoulders 
ached, the small of his back ached, —he ached all over, 
and his brain was heavy and dazed. He did not play at 
school. Nor did he study. Even to sit still all day at 
his desk, as he did, was a torment. It seemed centuries 
since he had begun the round of daily fights, and time 
stretched away into a nightmare and infinite future of 
daily fights. Why couldn’t Cheese-Face be licked? he 
often thought; that would put him, Martin, out of his 
misery. It never entered his head to cease fighting, to 
allow Cheese-Face to whip him. 

And so he dragged himself to the Hnquirer alley, 
sick in body and soul, but learning the long patience, to 
confront his eternal enemy, Cheese-FKace, who was just as 
sick as he, and just a bit willing to quit if it were not 
for the gang of newsboys that looked on and made pride 
painful and necessary. One afternoon, after twenty min- 
utes of desperate efforts to annihilate each other accord- 
ing to set rules that did not permit kicking, striking 
below the belt, nor hitting when one was down, Cheese- 
Face, panting for breath and reeling, offered to call it 
quits. And Martin, head on arms, thrilled at the picture 
he caught of himself, at that moment in the afternoon of 
long ago, when he reeled and panted and choked with the 
blood that ran into his mouth and down his throat from 
his cut lips; when he tottered toward Cheese-Face, spit- 
ting out a mouthful of blood so that he could speak, ery- 
ing out that he would never quit, though Cheese-Face 
could give in if he wanted to. And Cheese-Face did not 
give in, and the fight went on. 


MARTIN EDEN 133 


The next day and the next, days without end, witnessed 
the afternoon fight. When he put up his arms, each day, 
to begin, they pained exquisitely, and the first few blows, 
struck and received, racked his soul; after that things 
erew numb, and he fought on blindly, seeing as in a 
dream, dancing and wavering, the large features and burn- 
' ing, animal-like eyes of Cheese-Face. He concentrated 
upon that face; all else about him was a whirling void. 
There was nothing else in the world but that face, and he 
would never know rest, blessed rest, until he had beaten 
that face into a pulp with his bleeding knuckles, or until 
the bleeding knuckles that somehow belonged to that face 
had beaten him into a pulp. And then, one way or the 
other, he would have rest. But to quit, —for him, Martin, 
to quit, — that was impossible! 

Came the day when he dragged himself into the 
Enquirer alley, and there was no Cheese-Face. Nor did 
Cheese-Face come. The boys congratulated him, and told 
him that he had licked Cheese-Face. But Martin was 
not satisfied. He had not licked Cheese-Face, nor had 
Cheese-Face licked him. The problem had not been 
solved. It was not until afterward that they learned 
that Cheese-Face’s father had died suddenly that very 
day. 

Martin skipped on through the years to the night in the 
nigger heaven at the Auditorium. He was seventeen and 
just back from sea. A row started. Somebody was 
bullying somebody, and Martin interfered, to be con- 
fronted by Cheese-Face’s blazing eyes. 

“T’ll fix you after de show,” his ancient enemy hissed. 

Martin nodded. The nigger-heaven bouncer was making 
his way toward the disturbance. 

“T’ll meet you outside, after the last act,” Martin whis- 
pered, the while his face showed undivided interest in the 
buck-and-wing dancing on the stage. 

The bouncer glared and went away. 

“Got a gang?” he asked Cheese-Face, at the end of 
the act. 

ee Sure, - 


134 MARTIN EDEN 


“Then I got to get one,” Martin announced. 

Between the acts he mustered his following — three 
fellows he knew from the nail works, a railroad fireman, 
and half a dozen of the Boo Gang, along with as many more 
from the dread Eighteen-and-Market Gang. 

When the theatre let out, the two gangs strung along 
inconspicuously on opposite sides of the street. When 
they came to a quiet corner, they united and held a council 
of war. 

“ Kighth Street Bridge is the place,” said a red-headed 
fellow belonging to Cheese-Face’s gang. “ You kin fight 
in the middle, under the electric light, an’ whichever way 
the bulls come in we kin sneak the other way.” 

‘“‘ That’s agreeable to me,” Martin said, after consulting 
with the leaders of his own gang. 

The Eighth Street Bridge, crossing an arm of San An- 
tonio Estuary, was the length of three city blocks. In the 
middle of the bridge, and at each end, were electric lights. 
No policeman could pass those end-lights unseen. It was 
the safe place for the battle that revived itself under Mar- 
tin’s eyelids. He sawthe two gangs, aggressive and sul- 
len, rigidly keeping apart from each other and backing 
their respective champions; and he saw himself and Cheese- 
Face stripping. A short distance away lookouts were set, 
their task being to watch the lighted ends of the bridge. 
A member of the Boo Gang held Martin’s coat, and shirt, 
and cap, ready to race with them into safety in case the 
police interfered. Martin watched himself go into the 
centre, facing Cheese-Face, and he heard himself say, as he 
held up his hand warningly : — 

“They ain’t no hand-shakin’ in this. Understand ? 
They ain’t nothin’ but scrap. No throwin’ up the sponge. 
This is a grudge-fight an’ it’s to a finish. Understand ? 
Somebody’s goin’ to get licked.” 

Cheese-Face wanted to demur, — Martin could see that, 
— but Cheese-Face’s old perilous pride was touched before 
the two gangs. 

“ Aw, come on,” he replied. ‘ Wot’s the good of chewin’ 
de rag about it? I’m wit’ cheh to de finish.” 


MARTIN EDEN 135 


Then they fell upon each other, like young bulls, in all 
the glory of youth, with naked fists, with ‘hatred, with de- 
sire to hurt, to maim, to destroy. All the painful, thou- 
sand years’ gains of man in his upward climb through 
creation were lost. Only the electric hght remained, a 
milestone on the path of the great human adventure. 
» Martin and Cheese-Face were two savages, of the stone age, 
of the squatting place and the tree refuge. They sank 
‘ower and lower into the muddy abyss, back into the dregs 
of the raw beginnings of life, striving blindly and chemi- 
cally, as atoms strive, as the star-dust of the heavens strives, 
colliding, recoiling, and colliding again and eternally 
again. 

ae God! We are animals! Brute-beasts!” Martin 
muttered aloud, as he watched the progress of the fight. 
It was to him, with his splendid power of vision, like gazing 
into a kinetoscope. He was both onlooker and participant. 
His long months of culture and refinement shuddered at the 
sight; then the present was blotted out of his conscious- 
ness and the ghosts of the past possessed him, and he was 
Martin Eden, just returned from sea and fighting Cheese- 
Face on the Eighth Street Bridge. He suffered and toiled 
and sweated and bled, and exfilted when his naked knuckles 
smashed home. 

They were twin whirlwinds of hatred, revolving about 
each other monstrously. The time passed, and the two 
hostile gangs became very quiet. They had never wit- 
nessed such intensity of ferocity, and they were awed by 
it. The two fighters were greater brutes than they. The. 
first splendid velvet edge of youth and condition wore off, 
and they fought more cautiously and deliberately.. There 
had. been no advantage gained either way. “It’s any- 
body’s fight,” Martin heard some one saying. Then he 
followed up a feint, right and left, was fiercely countered, 
and felt his cheek laid open to the bone. Nobare knuckle 
had done that. He heard mutters of amazement at the 
ghastly damage wrought, and was drenched with his own 
blood. But he gave no sign. He became immensely wary, 
for he was wise with knowledge of the low cunning and 


136 MARTIN EDEN 


foul vileness of his kind. He watched and waited, until 
he feigned a wild rush, which he stopped midway, for he 
had seen the glint of metal. 

“Hold up yer hand!” he screamed. ‘“'Them’s brass 
knuckles, an’ you hit me with ’em ! ” 

Both gangs surged forward, growling and snarling. In 
a second there would be a free-for-all fight, and he would 
be robbed of his vengeance. He was beside himself. 

* You guys keep out!” he screamed hoarsely. “ Un- 
derstand? Say, d’ye understand?” 

They shrank away fromhim. They were brutes, but he 
was the arch-brute,a thing of terror that towered over 
them and dominated them. 

“This is my scrap, an’ they ain’t goin’ to be no buttin’ 
in. Gimme them knuckles.” 

Cheese-Face, sobered and a bit frightened, surrendered 
the foul weapon. 

“You passed ’em to him, you red-head sneakin’ in be- 
hind the push there,” Martin went on, as he tossed the 
knuckles into the water. ‘“ I seen you, an’ I was wonderin’ 
what you was up to. If you try anything like that again, 
I'll beat cheh to death. Understand?” 

They fought on, through exhaustion and beyond, to ex- 
haustion immeasurable and inconceivable, until the crowd 
of brutes, its blood-lust sated, terrified by what it saw, 
begged them impartially to cease. And Cheese-Face, ready 
to drop and die, or to stay on his legs and die, a grisly mon- 
ster out of whose features all likeness to Cheese-Face had 
been beaten, wavered and hesitated; but Martin sprang 
in and smashed him again and again. 

Next, after a seeming century or so, with Cheese-Face © 
weakening fast, in a mix-up of blows there was a loud snap, 
and Martin’s right arm dropped to his side. It was a 
broken bone. Everybody heard it and knew; and Cheese- 
Face knew, rushing like a tiger in the other’s extremity 
- and raining blow on blow. Martin’s gang surged forward 
to interfere. Dazed by the rapid succession of blows, 
Martin warned them back with vile and earnest curses 
sobbed out and groaned in ultimate desolation and despair. 


MARTIN EDEN 137 


He punched on, with his left hand only, and as he 
punched, doggedly, only half-conscious, as from a remote 
distance he heard murmurs of fear in the gangs, and one 
who said with shaking voice: ‘“ This ain’ta scrap, fellows. 
It’s murder, an’ we ought to stop it.” 

But no one stopped it, and he was glad, punching on 
wearily and endlessly with his one arm, battering away at 
a bloody something before him that was not a face but a 
horror, an oscillating, hideous, gibbering, nameless thing 
that persisted before his wavering vision and would not 
go away. And he punched on and on, slower and slower, 
as the last shreds of vitality oozed from him, through cen- 
turies and sons and enormous lapses of time, until,in a 
dim way, he became aware that the nameless thing was 
sinking, slowly sinking down to the rough board-planking 
of the bridge. And the next moment he was standing 
over it, staggering and swaying on shaky legs, clutching 
at the air for support, and saying in a voice he did not 
recognize : — 

“D’ye want any more? Say, d’ye want any more?” 

He was still saying it, over and over, — demanding, en- 
treating, threatening, to know if it wanted any more, — 
when he felt the fellows of his gang laying hands on him, 
patting him on the back and trying to put his coat on him. 
And then came a sudden rush of blackness and oblivion. 

The tin alarm-clock on the table ticked on, but Martin 
Eden, his face buried on his arms, did not hear it. He 
heard nothing. He did not think. So absolutely had he 
relived life that he had fainted just as he fainted years be- 
fore on the Eighth Street Bridge. Fora full minute the 
blackness and the blankness endured. ‘Then, like one from 
the dead, he sprang upright, eyes flaming, sweat pouring 
down his face, shouting : — 

“TJ licked you, Cheese-Face! It took me eleven years, 
but I licked you !” 

His knees were trembling under him, he felt faint, and 
he staggered back to the bed, sinking down and sitting on 
the edge of it. He was still in the clutch of the past. He 
looked about the room, perplexed, alarmed, wondering 


vA 
i 


Vs 


"fh 


138 MARTIN EDEN 


where he was, until he caught sight of the pile of manu- 
scripts inthe corner. ‘Then the wheels of memory slipped 
ahead through four years of time, and he was aware of the 
present, of the books he had opened and the universe he 
had won from their pages, of his dreams and ambitions, 
and of his love for a pale wraith of a girl, sensitive and 
sheltered and ethereal, who would die of horror did she 
witness but one moment of what he had just lived through 
—one moment of all the muck of life through which he 
had waded. 

He arose to his feet and confronted himself in the look- 
ing-glass. 

*¢ And so you arise from the mud, Martin Eden,” he said 
solemnly. ‘And you cleanse your eyes in a great bright- 
ness, and thrust your shoulders among the stars, doing 
what all life has done, letting the ‘ ape and tiger die’ and 
wresting highest heritage from all powers that be.” 

He looked more closely at himself and laughed. 

“A bit of hysteria and melodrama, eh?” he queried. 
‘Well, never mind. You licked Cheese-Face, and you'll 
lick the editors if it takes twice eleven years to do it in. 
You can’t stop here. You’ve got to go on. It’s to a 
finish, you know.” 


CHAPTER XVI 


THE alarm-clock went off, jerking Martin out of sleep 
with a suddenness that would have given headache to one 
with less splendid constitution. ‘Though heslept soundly, 
he awoke instantly, like a cat, and he awoke eagerly, glad 
that the five hours of unconsciousness were gone. He 
hated the oblivion of sleep. ‘There was too much to do, 
too much of life to live. He grudged every moment of 
life sleep robbed him of, and before the clock had ceased 
its clattering he was head and ears in the wash-basin and 
thrilling to the cold bite of the water. 

But hedid not follow his regularprogramme. There was 
no unfinished story waiting his hand, no new story demand- 
ing articulation. He had studied late, and it was nearly time 
for breakfast. He tried to read a chapter in Fiske, but 
his brain was restless and he closed the book. To-day 
witnessed the beginning of the new battle, wherein for 
some time there would be no writing. He was aware of a 
sadness akin to that with which one leaves home and 
family. He looked at the manuscripts in the corner. 
That was it. He was going away from them, his pitiful, 
dishonored children that were welcome nowhere. He 
went over and began to rummage among them, reading 
snatches here and there, his favorite portions. ‘The Pot” 
he honored with reading aloud, as he did “ Adventure.” 
“ Joy,” his latest-born, completed the day before and tossed 
into the corner for lack of stamps, won his keenest appro- 
bation. 

“IT can’t understand,” he murmured. ‘Or maybe it’s the 
editors who can’t understand. There’s nothing wrong 
with that. They publish worse every month. Every- 
thing they publish is worse—nearly everything, any- 
way.” 

139 


140 MARTIN EDEN 


After breakfast he put the type-writer in its case and 
carried it down into Oakland. 

‘‘T owe a month on it,” he told the clerk in the store. 
“But you tell the manager I’m going to work and that Pl 
be in in a month or so and straighten up.” 

He crossed on the ferry to San Francisco and made his 
way to an employment office. “Any kind of work, no 
trade,” he told the agent ; and was interrupted by a new- 
comer, dressed rather foppishly, as some workinemen dress 
who have instincts for finer things. The agent shook his 
head despondently. 

‘Nothin’ doin’, eh?” said the other. ‘ Well, I got to 
get somebody to-day.” 

He turned and stared at Martin, and Martin, staring 
back, noted the puffed and discolored face, handsome and 
weak, and knew that he had been making a night of it. 

“ Lookin’ for a job?” the other queried. “ What can 

ou do?”’ 
. .»“ Hard labor, sailorizing, run a type-writer, no short- 
“hand, can sit on a horse, willing to do anything and tackle 
anything,” was the answer. 

The other nodded. 

“Sounds goodtome. My name’s Dawson, Joe Dawson, 
an’ I’m tryin’ to scare up a laundryman.” 

“Too much for me.” Martin caught an amusing climpse 
of himself ironing fluffy white things that women wear. 
But he had taken a liking to the other, and he added: “ I 
might do the plain washing. I learned that much at sea.” 

Joe Dawson thought visibly for a moment. 

“ Look here, let’s get together an’ frame it up. Willin’ | 
to listen?” 

Martin nodded. 

“ This is a small laundry, up country, belongs to Shelly 
Hot Springs, — hotel, you know. Two men do the work, 
_boss and assistant. I’mthe boss. You don’t work for me, 
but you work underme. Think you'd be willin’ to learn ?” 

Martin paused to think. The prospect was alluring. A 
few months of it, and he would have time to himself for 
study. He could work hard and study hard. 


MARTIN EDEN 141 


“Good grub an’ a room to yourself,” Joe said. 

That settled it. A room to himself where he could burn 
the midnight oil unmolested. 

‘“ But work like hell,” the other added. 

Martin caressed his swelling shoulder-muscles signifi- 
cantly. ‘“ That came from hard work.” 

“Then let’s get to it.” Joe held his hand to his head 
foramoment. “Gee, but it’s astem-winder. Can hardly 
see. I went down the line last night — everything — 
everything. Here’s the frame-up. ‘The wages for two is 
a hundred and board. I’ve ben drawin’ down sixty, the 
second man forty. But he knew the biz. Youw’re green. 
If I break you in, I’ll be doing plenty of your work at 
first. Suppose you begin at thirty, an’ work up to the 
forty. ll play fair. Just as soon as you can do your 
share you get the forty.” 

“Tl go you,” Martin announced, stretching out his 
hand, which the other shook. ‘“ Any advance? — for rail- 
road ticket and extras?” 

‘‘ I blew it in,’ was Joe’s sad answer, with another reach 
at his aching head. “All I got is a return ticket.” 

‘And I’m broke — when I pay my board.” 

“ Jump it,” Joe advised. 

“Can’t. Owe it to my sister.” 

Joe whistled a long, perplexed whistle, and racked his 
brains to little purpose. 

“ve got the price of the drinks,” he said desperately. 
“¢ Come on, an’ mebbe we'll cook up something.” 

Martin declined. 

“ Water-wagon ?” 

This time Martin nodded, and Joe lamented, ‘‘ Wish I was. 

“ But I somehow just can’t,” he said in extenuation. 
« After I’ve ben workin’ like hell all week I just got to 
booze up. If I didn’t, ’d cut my throat or burn up the 
premises. But I’m glad you’re on the wagon. Stay with 
Lee 

Martin knew of the enormous gulf between him and 
this man —the gulf the books had made; but he found 
no difficulty in crossing back over that gulf. He had 


142 MARTIN EDEN 


lived all his life in the working-class world, and the cama- 
raderie of labor was second nature with him. He solved 
the difficulty of transportation that was too much for the 
other’s aching head. He would send his trunk up to 
Shelly Hot Springs on Joe’s ticket. As for himself, there 
was his wheel. It was seventy miles, and he could ride 
it on Sunday and be ready for work Monday morning. 
In the meantime he would go home and pack up. There 
was no one to say good-by to. Ruth and her whole 
family were spending the long summer in the Sierras, at 
Lake Tahoe. 

He arrived at Shelly Hot Springs, tired and dusty, on 
Sunday night. Joe greeted him exuberantly. With a 
wet towel bound about his aching brow, he had been at 
work all day. 

“ Part of last week’s washin’ mounted up, me bein’ away 
to get you,” he explained. “ Your box arrived all right. 
It’s in your room. But it’s a hell of a thing to call a 
trunk. An’ what’sin it? Gold bricks?” 

Joe sat on the bed while Martin unpacked. The box 
was a packing-case for breakfast food, and Mr. Higgin- 
botham had charged him half a dollar for it. Two rope 
handles, nailed on by Martin, had technically transformed 
it into a trunk eligible for the baggage-car. Joe watched, 
with bulging eyes, a few shirts and several changes of 
underclothes come out of the box, followed by books, and 
more books. 

‘“ Books clean to the bottom?” he asked. 

Martin nodded, and went on arranging the books ona 
kitchen table which served in the room in place of a wash- 
stand. 

“Gee!” Joe exploded, then waited in silence for the 
deduction to arise in his brain. At last it came. 

“Say, you don’t care for the girls — much ?” he queried. 

“ No,” was the answer. ‘I used to chase a lot before 
I tackled the books. But since then there’s no time.” 

“And there won’t be any time here. All you can do 
is work an’ sleep.” 

Martin thought of his five hours’ sleep a night, and 
smiled. The room was situated over the laundry and was 


MARTIN EDEN 143 


in the same building with the engine that pumped water, 
made electricity, and ran the laundry machinery. The 
engineer, who occupied the adjoining room, dropped in to 
meet the new hand and helped Martin rig up an electric 
bulb, on an extension wire, so that it travelled along a 
stretched cord from over the table to the bed. 

The next morning, at quarter-past six, Martin was 
routed out for a quarter-to-seven breakfast. There 
happened to be a bath-tub for the servants in the laundry 
building, and he electrified Joe by taking a cold bath. 

“Gee, but you’re a hummer!” Joe announced, as they 
sat down to breakfast in a corner of the hotel kitchen. 

With them was the engineer, the gardener, and the 
assistant gardener, and two or three men from the stable. 
They ate hurriedly and gloomily, with but little conversa- 
tion, and as Martin ate and listened he realized how far 
he had travelled from their status. Their small mental 
caliber was depressing to him, and he was anxious to get 
away from them. So he bolted his breakfast, a sickly, 
sloppy affair, as rapidly as they, and heaved a sigh of 
relief when he passed out through the kitchen door. 

It was a perfectly appointed, small steam laundry, 
wherein the most modern machinery did everything that 
was possible for machinery to do. Martin, after a few 
instructions, sorted the great heaps of soiled clothes, while 
Joe started the masher and made up fresh supplies of soft- 
soap, compounded of biting chemicals that compelled him 
to swathe his mouth and nostrils and eyes in bath-towels 
till he resembled a mummy. Finished the sorting, Martin 
lent a hand in wringing the clothes. This was done by 
dumping them into a spinning receptacle that went at a 
rate of a few thousand revolutions a minute, tearing the 
water from the clothes by centrifugal force. Then 
Martin began to alternate between the dryer and the 
wringer, between times “shaking out” socks and stock- 
ings. By the afternoon, one feeding and one stacking up, 
they were running socks and stockings through the mangle 
while the irons were heating. Then it was hot irons and 
underclothes till six o’clock, at which time Joe shook his 
head dubiously. | 


144 MARTIN EDEN 


“ Way behind,” he said. ‘Got to work after supper.” 

And after supper they worked until ten o’clock, under 
the blazing electric lights, until the last piece of under- 
clothing was ironed and folded away in the distributing 
room. It was a hot California night, and though the 
windows were thrown wide, the room, with its red-hot 
ironing-stove, was a furnace. Martin and Joe, down to 
undershirts, bare armed, sweated and panted for air. 

“Like trimming cargo in the tropics,’ Martin said, 
when they went upstairs. 

“You'll do,’ Joe answered. ‘You take hold like a 
good fellow. If you keep up the pace, you'll be on thirty 
dollars only one month. ‘The second month you'll be 
gettin’ your forty. But don’t tell me you never ironed 
before. I know better.” 

“Never ironed a rag in my life, honestly, until to-day,” 
Martin protested. 

He was surprised at his weariness when he got into his 
room, forgetful of the fact that he had been on his feet 
and working without let up for fourteen hours. He set 
the alarm at six, and measured back five hours to one 
o'clock. He could read until then. Slipping off his 
shoes, to ease his swollen feet, he sat down at the table 
with his books. He opened Fiske, where he had left off 
two days before, and began to read. But he found trouble 
with the first paragraph and began to read it through a 
second time. ‘Then he awoke, in pain from his stiffened 
muscles and chilled by the mountain wind that had begun 
to blow in through the window. He looked at the clock. 
It marked two. He had been asleep four hours. He 
pulled off his clothes and crawled into bed, where he was © 
asleep the moment after his head touched the pillow. 

Tuesday was a day of similar unremitting toil. The 
speed with which Joe worked won Martin’s admiration. 
Joe was a dozen of demons for work. He was keyed up 
to concert pitch, and there was never a moment in the 
long day when he was not fighting for moments. He 
concentrated himself upon his work and upon how to 
save time, pointing out to Martin where he did in five 


MARTIN EDEN 145 


motions what could be done in three, or in three motions 
what could be done in two. “Elimination of waste 
motion,’ Martin phrased it as he watched and patterned 
after. He was a good workman himself, quick and deft, 
and it had always been a point of pride with him that no 
man should do any of his work for him or outwork him. 
As a result, he concentrated with a similar singleness of © 
purpose, greedily snapping up the hints and suggestions 
thrown out by his working mate. He “rubbed out’ 
collars and cuffs, rubbing the starch out from between the 
double thicknesses of linen so that there would be no- 
blisters when it came to the ironing, and doing it at a 
pace that elicited Joe’s praise. 

There was never an interval when something was not 
at hand to be done. Joe waited for nothing, waited on 
nothing, and went on the jump from task to task. They 
starched two hundred white shirts, with a single gather- 
ing movement seizing a shirt so that the wristbands, 
neckband, yoke, and bosom protruded beyond the cir- 
cling right hand. At the same moment the left hand 
held up the body of the shirt so that it would not enter 
the starch, and at the same moment the right hand dipped 
into the starch — starch so hot that, in order to wring it 
out, their hands had to be thrust, and thrust continu- 
ally, into a bucket of cold water. And that night they 
worked till half-past ten, dipping “fancy starch” —all 
the frilled and airy, delicate wear of ladies. 

‘Me for the tropics and no clothes,” Martin laughed. 

«And me out of a job,” Joe answered seriously. “I 
don’t know nothin’ but laundrying.” 

« And you know it well.” 

“T ought to. Began in the Contra Costa in Oakland 
when I was eleven, shakin’ out for the mangle. That was 
eighteen years ago, an’ I’ve never done a tap of anything 
else. But this job is the fiercest lever had. Ought to 
be one more man on it at least. We work to-morrow 
night. Always run the mangle Wednesday nights— 
collars an’ cuffs.” 

Martin set his alarm, drew up to the table, and opened 

L 


146 MARTIN EDEN 


Fiske. He did not finish the first paragraph. The lines 
blurred and ran together and his head nodded. He 
walked up and down, batting his head savagely with his 
fists, but he could not conquer the numbness of sleep. 
He propped the book before him, and propped his eyelids 
with his fingers, and fell asleep with his eyes wide open. 
Then he surrendered, and, scarcely conscious of what he 
did, got off his clothes and into bed. He slept seven 
hours of heavy, animal-like sleep, and awoke by the 
alarm, feeling that he had not had enough. 

“ Doin’ much readin’ ?” Joe asked. 

Martin shook his head. 

‘““Never mind. We got to run the mangle to-night, 
but Thursday we’ll knock off at six. That'll give you a 
chance.” 

Martin washed woollens that day, by hand, in a large 
barrel, with strong soft-soap, by means of a hub from 
a wagon wheel, mounted on a plunger-pole that was 
attached to a spring-pole overhead. 

“My invention,” Joe said proudly. ‘Beats a wash- 
board an’ your knuckles, and, besides, it saves at least 
fifteen minutes in the week, an’ fifteen minutes ain’t to 
be sneezed at in this shebang.” 

Running the collars and cuffs through the mangle was 
also Joe’s idea. ‘That night, while they toiled on under 
the electric ights, he explained it. 

“Something no laundry ever does, except this one. 
An’ I got to do it if I’m goin’ to get done Saturday after- 
noon at three o’clock. But I know how, an’ that’s the 
difference. Got to have right heat, right pressure, and 
run ’em through three times. Look at that!” He held 
a cuff aloft. ‘Couldn’t do it better by hand or on a 
tiler.” 

Thursday, Joe wasinarage. <A bundle of extra “fancy 
starch’ had come in. 

“Tm goin’ to quit,” he announced. “I won’t stand for 
it. Dm goin’ to quit it cold. What’s the good of me 
workin’ like a slave all week, a-savin’ minutes, an’ them 
a-comin’ an’ ringin’ in fancy-starch extras on me? ‘This 


MARTIN EDEN 147 


is a free country, an’ I’m goin’ to tell that fat Dutchman 
what I think of him. An’ I won’t tell ’m in French. 
Plain United States is good enough for me. Him 
a-ringin’ in fancy starch extras ! 

“We got to work to-night,” he said the next moment, 
reversing his judgment and surrendering to fate. 
And Martin did no reading that night. He had seen 
no daily paper all week, and, strangely to him, felt no 
desire to see one. He was not interested in the news. 
He was too tired and jaded to be interested in anything, 
though he planned to leave Saturday afternoon, if they 
finished at three, and ride on his wheel to Oakland. It 
was seventy miles, and the same distance back on Sunday 
afternoon would leave him anything but rested for the 
second week’s work. It would have been easier to go on 
the train, but the round trip was two dollars and a half, 
and he was intent on saving money. 


CHAPTER XVII 


MARTIN learned to do many things. In the course of 
the first week, in one afternoon, he and Joe accounted for 
the two hundred white shirts. Joe ran the tiler, a machine 
wherein a hot iron was hooked on a steel string which fur- 
nished the pressure. By this means he ironed the yoke, 
wristbands, and neckband, setting the latter at right angles 
to the shirt, and put the glossy finish on the bosom. As 
fast as he finished them, he flung the shirts on a rack be- 
tween him and Martin, who caught them up and “ backed” 
them. This task consisted of ironing all the unstarched 
portions of the shirts. 

It was exhausting work, carried on, hour after hour, at 
top speed. Out on the broad verandas of the hotel, men 
and women, in cool white, sipped iced drinks and kept their 
circulation down. Butin the laundry the air was sizzling. 
The huge stove roared red hot and white hot, while the 
irons, moving over the damp cloth, sent up clouds of steam. 
The heat of these irons was different from that used by 
housewives. An iron that stood the ordinary test of a 
wet finger was too cold for Joe and Martin, and such test 
was useless. ‘They went wholly by holding the irons close 
to their cheeks, gauging the heat by some secret mental 
process that Martin admired but could not understand. 
When the fresh irons proved too hot, they hooked them on 
iron rods and dipped them into cold water. This again 
required a precise and subtle judgment. A fraction of a 
second too long in the water and the fine and silken edge 
of the proper heat was lost, and Martin found time to 
marvel at the accuracy he developed — an automatic accu- 
racy, founded upon criteria that were machine-like and 
unerring. 

But there was little time in which to marvel. All 

148 


MARTIN EDEN 149 


Martin’s consciousness was concentrated in the work. 
Ceaselessly active, head and hand, an intelligent machine, 
all that constituted him a man was devoted to furnishing 
that intelligence. ‘There was no room in his brain for 
the universe and its mighty problems. AJ]l the broad and 
spacious corridors of his mind were closed and hermetically 
sealed. ‘The echoing chamber of his soul was a narrow 
room, a conning tower, whence were directed his arm and 
shoulder muscles, his ten nimble fingers, and the swift- 
moving iron along its steaming path in broad, sweeping 
strokes, just so many strokes and no more, just so far with 
each stroke and not a fraction of an inch farther, rushing 
along interminable sleeves, sides, backs, and tails, and 
tossing the finished shirts, without rumpling, upon the 
receiving frame. And even as his hurrying soul tossed, 
it was reaching for another shirt. This went on, hour 
after hour, while outside all the world swooned under the 
overhead California sun. But there was no swooning in 
that superheated room. The cool guests on the verandas 
needed clean linen. 

The sweat poured from Martin. He drank enormous 
quantities of water, but so great was the heat of the day 
and of his exertions, that ‘the water sluiced through the 
interstices of his flesh and out at all his pores. Always, 
at sea, except at rare intervals, the work he performed 
had given him ample opportunity to commune with him- 
self. The master of the ship had been lord of Martin’s 
time; but here the manager of the hotel was lord of 
Martin’s thoughts as well. He had no thoughts save for 
the nerve-racking, body-destroying toil. Outside of that 
it was impossible to think. He did not know that he 
loved Ruth. She did not even exist, for his driven soul 
had no time to remember her. It was only when he 
crawled to bed at night, or to breakfast in the morning, 
that she asserted herself to him in fleeting memories. 

‘This is hell, ain’t it?’ Joe remarked once. 

Martin nodded, but felt a rasp of irritation. The state- 
ment had been obvious and unnecessary. They did not 
talk while they worked. Conversation threw them out 


150 MARTIN EDEN 


of their stride, as it did this time, compelling Martin to 
miss a stroke of his iron and to make two extra motions 
before he caught his stride again. 

On Friday morning the washer ran. Twice a week they 
had to put through hotel linen, —the sheets, pillow-slips, 
spreads, table-cloths, and napkins. This finished, they 
buckled down to “fancy starch.” It was slow work, 
fastidious and delicate, and Martin did not learn it so 
readily. Besides, he could not take chances. Mistakes 
were disastrous. 

“See that,” Joe said, holding up a filmy corset-cover 
that he could have crumpled from view in one hand. 
‘Scorch that an’ it’s twenty dollars out of your wages.”’ 

So Martin did not scorch that, and eased down on his 
muscular tension, though nervous tension rose higher than 
ever, and he listened sympathetically to the other’s 
blasphemies as he toiled and suffered over the beautiful 
things that women wear when they do not have to do their 
own laundrying. “Fancy starch” was Martin’s night- 
mare, and it was Joe’s, too. It was “fancy starch” that 
robbed them of their hard-won minutes. They toiled at 
it all day. At seven in the evening they broke off to run 
the hotel linen through the mangle. At ten o’clock, while 
the hotel guests slept, the two laundrymen sweated on at 
“fancy starch” till midnight, till one, till two. At half- 
past two they knocked off. 

Saturday morning it was “ fancy starch,” and odds and 
ends, and at three in the afternoon the week’s work was 
done. 

‘“‘ You ain’t a-goin’ to ride them seventy miles into Oak- 
land on top of this?” Joe demanded, as they sat on the 
stairs and took a triumphant smoke. 

** Got to,” was the answer. 

“What are you goin’ for? —a girl?” 

“No; to save two and a half on the railroad ticket. I 
want to renew some books at the library.” 

“Why don’t you send ’em down an’ up by express ? 
That'll cost only a quarter each way.” 

Martin considered it. 


MARTIN EDEN 151 


“ An’ take a rest to-morrow,” the other urged. “You 
need it. I know Ido. I’m plumb tuckered out.” 

He looked it. Indomitable, never resting, fighting for 
seconds and minutes all week, circumventing delays and 
crushing down obstacles, a fount of resistless energy, a 
high-driven human motor, a demon for work, now that he 
had accomplished the week’s task he was in a state of 
collapse. He was worn and haggard, and his handsome 
face drooped in lean exhaustion. He puffed his cigarette 
spiritlessly, and his voice was peculiarly dead and monoto- 
nous. All the snap and fire had gone out of him. His 
triumph seemed a sorry one. 

“ An’ next week we got to do it all over again,” he said 
sadly. ‘‘ An’ what’s the good of it all, hey? Sometimes 
I wish I was a hobo. They don’t work, an’ they get their 
livin’. Gee! I wish I had a glass of beer; but I can’t 
get up the gumption to go down to the village an’ get 
it. You'll stay over, an’ send your books down by ex- 
press, or else you're a damn fool.” 

“ But what can Ido here all day Sunday?” Martin asked. 

“ Rest. You don’t know how tired youare. Why, I’m 
that tired Sunday I can’t even read the papers. I was 
sick once—typhoid. In the hospital two months an’ a 
half. Didn’t do a tap of work all that time. It was 
beautiful. 

“Tt was beautiful,’ he repeated dreamily, a minute 
later. 

Martin took a bath, after which he found that the head 
laundryman had disappeared. Most likely he had gone 
for the glass of beer, Martin decided, but the half-mile 
walk down to the village to find out seemed a long jour- 
ney to him. He lay on his bed with his shoes off, trying 
to make up his mind. He did not reach out for a book. 
He was too tired to feel sleepy, and he lay, scarcely think- 
ing, in a semi-stupor of weariness, until it was time for 
supper. Joe did not appear for that function, and when 
Martin heard the gardener remark that most likely he 
was ripping the slats off the bar, Martin understood. He 
went to bed immediately afterward, and in the morning 


152 MARTIN EDEN 


decided that he was greatly rested. Joe being still absent, 
Martin procured a Sunday paper and lay down in a shady 
nook under the trees. The morning passed, he knew 
not how. He did not sleep, nobody disturbed him, and 
he did not finish the paper. He came back to it in the 
afternoon, after dinner, and fell asleep over it. 

So passed Sunday, and Monday morning he was hard 
at work, sorting clothes, while Joe, a towel bound tightly 
around his head, with groans and blasphemies, was run- 
ning the washer and mixing soft-soap. 

“T simply can’t help it,” he explained. “I got to drink 
when Saturday night comes around.” 

Another week passed, a great battle that continued 
under the electric lights each night and that culminated 
on Saturday afternoon at three o’clock, when Joe tasted 
his moment of wilted triumph and then drifted down to 
the village to forget. Martin’s Sunday was the same as 
before. He slept in the shade of the trees, toiled aimlessly 
through the newspaper, and spent long hours lying on 
his back, doing nothing, thinking nothing. He was too 
dazed to think, though he was aware that he did not like 
himself. He was self-repelled, as though he had under- 
gone some degradation or was intrinsically foul. All 
that was god-like in him was blotted out. The spur of 
ambition was blunted; he had no vitality with which to 
feel the prod of it. He was dead. His soul seemed dead. 
He was a beast, a work-beast. He saw no beauty in the 
sunshine sifting down through the green leaves, nor did 
the azure vault of the sky whisper as of old and hint of 
cosmic vastness and secrets trembling to disclosure. Life 
was intolerably dull and stupid, and its taste was bad 
in his mouth. <A black screen was drawn across his mirror 
of inner vision, and fancy lay in a darkened sick-room 
where entered no ray of light. He envied Joe, down in 
the village, rampant, tearing the slats off the bar, his brain 
gnawing with maggots, exulting in maudlin ways over 
maudlin things, fantastically and gloriously drunk and 
forgetful of Monday morning and the week of deadening 
toil to come. 


MARTIN EDEN 153 


A third week went by, and Martin loathed himself, and 
loathed life. He was oppressed by a sense of failure. 
There was reason for the editors refusing his stuff. He 
could see that clearly now, and laugh at himself and the 
dreams he had dreamed. Ruth returned his “Sea Lyrics” 
by mail. He read her letter apathetically. She did her 
best to say how much she hked them and that they were 
beautiful. But she could not lie, and she could not 
disguise the truth from herself. She knew they were 
failures, and he read her disapproval in every perfunctory 
and unenthusiastic line of her letter. And she was right. 
He was firmly convinced of it as he read the poems over. 
Beauty and wonder had departed from him, and as he 
read the poems he caught himself puzzling as to what 
he had had in mind when he wrote them. His audac- 
ities of phrase struck him as grotesque, his felicities of 
expression were monstrosities, and everything was absurd, 
unreal, and impossible. He would have burned the “Sea 
Lyrics” on the spot, had his will been strong enough to 
set them aflame. There was the engine-room, but the 
exertion of carrying them to the furnace was not worth 
while. All his exertion was used in washing other per- 
sons’ clothes. He did not have any left for private affairs. 

He resolved that when Sunday came he would pull him- 
self together and answer Ruth’s letter. But Saturday 
afternoon, after work was finished and he had taken a bath, 
the desire to forget overpowered him. “I guess I'll go 
down and see how Joe’s getting on,” was the way he put 
it to himself; and in the same moment he knew that he 
lied. But he did not have the energy to consider the 
lie. If he had had the energy, he would have refused to 
consider the lie, because he wanted to forget. He started 
for the village slowly and casually, increasing his pace 
in spite of himself as he neared the saloon. 

“T thought you was on the water-wagon,’ 
greeting. 

Martin did not deign to offer excuses, but called for 
whiskey, filling his own glass brimming before he passed 
the bottle. 


> was Joe’s 


154 MARTIN EDEN 


“ Don’t take all night about it,” he said roughly. 

The other was dawdling with the bottle, and Martin 
refused to wait for him, tossing the glass off in a gulp and 
refilling it. 

‘Now, I can wait for you,” he said grimly; “ but hurry 
Uu , 

Joe hurried, and they drank together. 

‘The work did it, eh?” Joe queried. 

Martin refused to discuss the matter. 

‘“Tt’s fair hell, I know,” the other went on, ‘“ but I kind 
of hate to see you come off the wagon, Mart. Well, here’s 
how!” 

Martin drank on silently, biting out his orders and 
invitations and awing the barkeeper, an effeminate country 
youngster with watery blue eyes and hair parted in the 
middle. 

“Tt’s something scandalous the way they work us poor 
devils,” Joe was remarking. “If I didn’t bowl up, I’d 
break loose an’ burn down the shebang. My bowlin’ up 
is all that saves ’em, I can tell you that.” 

But Martin made no answer. A few more drinks, and 
in his brain he felt the maggots of intoxication beginning 
to crawl. Ah, it was living, the first breath of life he 
had breathed in three weeks. His dreams came back to 
him. Fancy came out of the darkened room and lured 
him on, a thing of flaming brightness. His mirror of 
vision was silver-clear, a flashing, dazzling palimpsest of 
imagery. Wonder and beauty walked with him, hand 
in hand, and all power was his. He tried to tell it to Joe, 
but Joe had visions of his own, infallible schemes whereby 
he would escape the slavery of laundry-work and become 
himself the owner of a great steam laundry. 

“T tell yeh, Mart, they won’t be no kids workin’ in 
my laundry—not on yer life. An’ they won’t be no 
workin’ a livin’ soul after six p.M. You hear me talk! 
They'll be machinery enough an’ hands enough to do 
it all in decent workin’ hours, an’ Mart, s’help me, I'll 
make yeh superintendent of the shebang—the whole 
of it, all of it. Now here’s the scheme. I get on the 


MARTIN EDEN 155 


water-wagon an’ save my money for two years — save an’ 
then —” 

But Martin turned away, leaving him to tell it to the 
barkeeper, until that worthy was called away to furnish 
drinks to two farmers who, coming in, accepted Mar- 
tin’s invitation. Martin dispensed royal largess, inviting 
everybody up, farm-hands, a stableman, and the gardener’s 
assistant from the hotel, the barkeeper, and the furtive 
hobo who slid in like a shadow and like a shadow hovered 
at the end of the bar. 


CHAPTER XVIII 


MonpDAY morning, Joe groaned over the first truck load 
of clothes to the washer. 

“T say,” he began. 

“ Don’t talk to me,”’ Martin snarled. 

“I’m sorry, Joe,” he said at noon, when they knocked 
off for dinner. 

Tears came into the other’s eyes. 

“ That’s all right, old man,” be said. ‘“ We’re in hell, 
an’ we can’t help ourselves. An’, you know, I kind of 
like you a whole lot. That’s what made it hurt. I cot- 
toned to you from the first.” 

Martin shook his hand. 

“Let’s quit,” Joe suggested. ‘“ Let’s chuck it, an’ go 
hoboin’. I ain’t never tried it, but it must be dead easy. 
An’ nothin’) to (do, Just think /oliitimotbin to dost 
was sick once, typhoid, in the hospital, an’ it was beauti- 
ful. I wish I’d get sick again.” 

The week dragged on. ‘The hotel was full, and extra 
“fancy starch’ poured in upon them. They performed 
prodigies of valor. ‘They fought late each night under 
the electric lights, bolted their meals, and even got in a 
half hour’s work before breakfast. Martin no longer took 
his cold baths. Every moment was drive, drive, drive, 
and Joe was the masterful shepherd of moments, herding 
them carefully, never losing one, counting them over like 
a miser counting gold, working on in a frenzy, toil-mad, 
a feverish machine, aided ably by that other machine 
‘that thought of itself as once having been one Martin 
Eden, a man. 

But it was only at rare moments that Martin was able 
to think. The house of thought was closed, its windows 
boarded up, and he was its shadowy caretaker. He was 

156 


r4 


rey 4 


f 
MARTIN pe I 157 


a shadow. Joe was right. They were both shadows, 
and this was the unending limbo of toil. Or was it a 
dream? Sometimes, in the steaming, sizzling heat, as he 
swung the heavy irons back and ‘orth over the white gar- 
ments, it came to him that it was a dream. In a short 
while, or maybe after a thousand years or so, he would 
awake, in his little room with the ink-stained table, and 
take up his writing where he had left off the day before. 
Or maybe that was a dream, too, and the awakening would 
be the changing of the watches, when he would drop 
down out of his bunk in the lurching forecastle and go 
up on deck, under the tropic stars, and take the wheel 
and feel the cool tradewind blowing through his flesh. 

Came Saturday and its hollow victory at three o’clock. 

‘Guess T1l go down an’ get a glass of beer,” Joe said, 
in the queer, monotonous tones that marked his week-end 
collapse. 

Martin seemed suddenly to wake up. He opened the 
kit bag and oiled his wheel, putting graphite on the 
chain and adjusting the bearings. Joe was halfway 
down to the saloon when Martin passed by, bending low 
over the handle-bars, his legs driving the ninety-six gear 
with rhythmic strength, his face set. for seventy miles of 
road and grade and dust. He slept in Oakland that 
night, and on Sunday covered the seventy miles back. 
And on Monday morning, weary, he began the new 
week’s work, but he had kept sober. 

A fifth week passed, and a sixth, during which he lived . 
and toiled as a machine, with just a spark of something 
more in him, just a glimmering bit of soul, that compelled 
him, at each week-end, to scorch off the hundred and forty 
miles. But this was not rest. It was super-machinelike, 
and it helped to crush out the glimmering bit of soul that 
was all that was left him from former life. At the end of 
the seventh week, without intending it, too weak to resist, 
he drifted down to the village with Joe and drowned life 
and found life until Monday morning. 

Again, at the week-ends, he ground out the one hun- 
dred and forty miles, obliterating the numbness of too 


i 
\ 


158 -IARTIN EDEN 


great exertion by the numbness of still greater exertion. 
At the end of three months he went down a third time to 
the village with Joe. He forgot, and lived again, and, 
living, he saw, in clear illumination, the beast he was 
making of himself —not by the drink, but by the work. 
The drink was an effect, not a cause. It followed inevi- 
tably upon the work, as the night follows upon the day. 
Not by becoming a toil-beast could he win to the heights, 
was the message the whiskey whispered to him, and he 
nodded approbation. The whiskey was wise. It told 
secrets on itself. 

He called for paper and pencil, and for drinks all 
around, and while they drank his very good health, he 

clung to the bar and scribbled. 

- “A telegram, Joe,” he said. ‘ Read it.” 

Joe read it with a drunken, quizzical leer. But what 
he read seemed to sober him. He looked at the other 
reproachfully, tears oozing into his eyes and down his 
cheeks. 

“ You ain’t goin’ back on me, Mart?” he queried hope- 
lessly. 

Martin nodded, and called one of the loungers to him 
to take the message to the telegraph office. 

“ Hold on,” Joe muttered thickly. ‘ Lemme think.” 

He held on to the bar, his legs wobbling under him, 
Martin’s arm around him and supporting him, while he 
thought. 

“Make that two laundrymen,” he said abruptly. 
‘s Here, lemme fix it.” 

“What are you quitting for?” Martin demanded. 

‘Same reason as you.” 

“ But I’m going to sea. You can’t do that.” 

“‘ Nope,” was the answer, “but I can hobo all right, all 
right.” 

-Martin looked at him searchingly for a moment, then 
cried : — 

“ By God, I think yow’re right! Better a hobo than a 
beast of toil. Why, man, you'll live. And that’s more 
than you ever did before.” 


MARTIN EDEN 159 


“] was in hospital, once,” Joe corrected. “It was 


beautiful. Typhoid — did I tell you?” 

While Martin changed the telegram to “two laundry- 
men,” Joe went on : — 

“JT never wanted to drink when I was in hospital. 
Funny, ain’t it? But when I’ve ben workin’ like a 
slave all week, I just got to bowl up. Ever noticed that 
cooks drink like hell? — an’ bakers, too? It’s the work. 
They’ve sure got to. Here, lemme pay half of that 
telegram.” 

“Tl shake you for it,” Martin offered. 

“ Come on, everybody drink,” Joe called, as they rattled 
the dice and rolled them out on the damp bar. 

Monday morning Joe was wild with anticipation. He 
did not mind his aching head, nor did he take interest in 
his work. Whole herds of moments stole away and were 
lost while their careless shepherd gazed out of the window 
at the sunshine and the trees. 

“Just look at it!” heeried. “An’it’sall mine! It’s 
free. I can lie down under them trees an’ sleep for a 
thousan’ years if I want to. Aw, come on, Mart, let’s 
chuck it. What’s the goed of waitin’ another moment. 
That’s the land of nothin’ to do out there, an’ I got a 
ticket for it — an’ it ain’t no return ticket, b’gosh !” 

A few minutes later, filling the truck with soiled clothes 
for the washer, Joe spied the hotel manager’s shirt. He 
knew its mark, and with a sudden glorious consciousness 
of freedom he threw it on the floor and stamped on it. 

“TJ wish you was in it, you pig-headed Dutchman!” he 
shouted. ‘In it, an’ right there where I’ve got you! 
Take that! an’ that! an’ that! damn you! Hold me back, 
somebody! Hold me back!” 

Martin laughed and held him to his work. On Tues- 
day night the new Jaundrymen arrived, and the rest of 
the week was spent breaking them into the routine. Joe 
sat around and explained his system, but he did no more 
work. 

“Not a tap,” he announced. “Not a tap. They can 
fire me if they want to, but if they do, Pll quit. No 


160 MARTIN EDEN 


more work in mine, thank you kindly. Me for the 
freight cars an’ the shade under the trees. Go to it, you 
slaves! That’s right. Slave an’ sweat! Slave an’ 
sweat! An’ when you’re dead, you'll rot the same as 
me, an’ what’s it matter how you hve?—-eh? Tell me 
that — what’s 1t matter in the long run?” 

On Saturday they drew their pay and came to the part- 
ing of the ways. 

“They ain’t no use in me askin’ you to change your 
mind an’ hit the road with me?” Joe asked hopelessly. 

Martin shook his head. He was standing by his wheel, 
ready to start. They shook hands, and Joe held on to 
his for a moment, as he said : — 

“T’m goin’ to see you again, Mart, before you an’ 
me die. That’s straight dope. I feel it in my bones. 
Good-by, Mart, an’ be good. I like you like hell, you 
know.” 

He stood, a forlorn figure, in the middle of the road, 
watching until Martin turned a bend and was gone from 
sight. 

“‘ He’s a good Indian, that boy,” he muttered. “A good 
Indian.” 

Then he plodded down the road himself, to the water- 
tank, where half a dozen empties lay on a side-track 
waiting for the up freight. 


CHAPTER XIX 


RutH and her family were home again, and Martin, re- 
turned to Oakland, saw much of her. Having gained her 
degree, she was doing no more studying; and he, having 
worked all vitality out of his mind and body, was doing 
no writing. This gave them time for each other that 
they had never had before, and their intimacy ripened 
fast. 

At first, Martin had done nothing but rest. He had 
slept a great deal, and spent long hours musing and think- 
ing and doing nothing. He was like one recovering from 
some terrible bout of hardship. The first signs of re- 
awakening came when he discovered more than languid 
interest in the daily paper. Then he began toread again 
—light novels, and poetry; and after several days more 
he was head over heels in his long-neglected Fiske. His . 
splendid body and health made new vitality, and he 
possessed all the resiliency and rebound of youth. 

Ruth showed her disappointment plainly when he an- 
nounced that he was going to sea for another voyage as 
soon as he was well rested. 

“¢ Why do you want to do that?” she asked. 

* Money,” was the answer. “Ill have to lay in a, 


supply for my next attack on the editors. Money is the ~ 


sinews of war, in my case — money and patience.” 

« But if all you wanted was money, why didn’t you stay 
in the laundry ?”’ 

“ Because the laundry was making a beast of me. ‘Too 
much work of that sort drives to drink.” 

She stared at him with horror in her eyes. 

“Do you mean — ?” she quavered. 

It would have been easy for him to get out of it; but 
his natural impulse was for frankness, and he remembered 
his old resolve to be frank, no matter what happened. 

M 161 


162 MARTIN EDEN 


“Yes,” he answered. “Just that. Several times.” 

She shivered and drew away from him. 

“ Noman that I have ever knowndidthat—everdid that.” 

“Then they never worked in the laundry at Shelly 
Hot Springs,” he laughed bitterly. “Toil is a good 
thing. It is necessary for human health, so all the 
preachers say, and Heaven knows I’ve never been afraid 
of it. But there is such a thing as too much of a 
good thing, and the laundry up there is one of them. 
And that’s why I’m going to sea one more voyage. It 
will be my last, I think, for when I come back, I shall 
break into the magazines. I am certain of it.” 

She was silent, unsympathetic, and he watched her 
moodily, realizing how impossible it was for her to under- 
stand what he had been through. 

“Some day I shall write it up—‘ The Degradation of 
Toil’ or the ‘ Psychology of Drink in the Working-class,’ 
or something like that for a title.” 

Never, since the first meeting, had they seemed so far 
apart as that day. His confession, told in frankness, with 
the spirit of revolt behind, had repelled her. But she 
was more shocked by the repulsion itself than by the 
cause of it. It pointed out to her how near she had 
drawn to him, and once accepted, it paved the way for 
greater intimacy. Pity, too, was aroused, and innocent, 
idealistic thoughts of reform. She would save this raw 
young man who had come so far. She would save him 
from the curse of his early environment, and she would 
save him from himself in spite of himself. And all this 
affected her as a very noble state of consciousness ; nor 
did she dream that behind it and underlying it were the 
jealousy and desire of love. 

They rode on their wheels much in the delightful fall 
weather, and out in the hills they read poetry aloud, now 
one and now the other, noble, uplifting poetry that 
turned one’s thoughts to higher things. Renunciation, 


«sacrifice, patience, industry, and high endeavor were the 


principles she thus indirectly preached — such abstrac- 
tions being objectified in her mind by her father, and 


‘ 


MARTIN EDEN 163 


Mr. Butler, and by Andrew Carnegie, who, from a poor . 
immigrant boy had arisen to be the book-giver of theworld. ™ 


All of which was appreciated and enjoyed by Martin. 
He followed her mental processes more clearly now, and her 
soul was no longer the sealed wonder it had been. He 
was on terms of intellectual equality with her. But the 
points of disagreement did not affect his love. His love 
was more ardent than ever, for he loved her for what she 
was, and even her physical frailty was an added charm in 
his eyes. He read of sickly Elizabeth Barrett, who for 
years had not-placed her feet upon the ground, until that 
day of flame when she eloped with Browning and stood 
upright, upon the earth, under the open sky; and what 
Browning had done for her, Martin decided he could do 
for Ruth. But first, she must love him. The rest would 
be easy. He would give her strength and health. And 
he caught glimpses of their life, in the years to come, 
wherein, against a background of work and comfort and 


general well-being, he saw himself and Ruth reading . 


and discussing poetry, she propped amid a multitude of 
cushions on the ground while she read aloud to him. 
This was the key to thee life they would live. And 
always he saw that particular picture. Sometimes it was 
she who leaned against him while he read, one arm about 
her, her head upon his shoulder. Sometimes they pored 
together over the printed pages of beauty. Then, too, 
she loved nature, and with generous imagination he 
changed the scene of their reading—sometimes they 
read in closed-in valleys with precipitous walls, or in 
high mountain meadows, and, again, down by the gray 
sand-dunes with a wreath of billows at their feet, or afar 
on some yolcanic tropic isle where waterfalls descended 
and became mist, reaching the sea in vapor veils that 
swayed and shivered to every vagrant wisp of wind. But 
always, in the foreground, lords of beauty and eternally 
reading and sharing, lay he and Ruth, and always in the 
background that was beyond the background of nature, 


dim and hazy, were work and success and money earned 


that made them free of the world and -alLits.treasutes. 


164 MARTIN EDEN 


“JT should recommend my little girl to be careful,” her 
mother warned her one day. 

“IT know what you mean. But itis impossible. He is 
not —” 

Ruth was blushing, but it was the blush of maidenhood 
called upon for the first time to discuss the sacred things 
of life with a mother held equally sacred. 

‘ Your kind,” Her mother finished the sentence for her. 

Ruth nodded. 

“‘T did not want to say it, but heis not. He is rough, 
brutal, strong —too strong. He has not —” 

She hesitated and could not go on. It was a new ex- 
perience, talking over such matters with her mother. And 
again her mother completed her thought for her. 

‘He has not lived a clean life, is what you wanted to 
say.” 

Again Ruth nodded, and again a blush mantled her face. 

“Tt is just that,” she said. “It has not been his fault, 
but he has played much with — ”’ 

“ With pitch?” 

“ Yes, with pitch. And he frightens me. Sometimes 
I am positively in terror of him, when he talks in that free 
and easy way of the things he has done—as if they did 
not matter. They do matter, don’t they?” 

They sat with their arms twined around each other, and 
in the pause her mother patted her hand and waited for 
her to go on. 

* But lam interested in him dreadfully,” she continued. 
“In a way he is my protege. Then, too, he is my first boy 
friend — but not exactly friend; rather protégé and friend 
combined. Sometimes, too, when he frightens me, it seems 
that he is a bulldog I have taken for a plaything, like some 
of the ‘frat’ girls, and he is tugging hard, and showing 
his teeth, and threatening to break loose.” 

_ Again her mother waited. 

“ He interests me, I suppose, like the bulldog. And there 
is much good in him, too; but there is much in him 
that I would not lke in—in the other way. You see, I 
have been thinking. He swears, he smokes, he drinks, he 


MARTIN EDEN. 165 


has fought with his fists (he has told me so, and he likes 
it; he says so). He is all that a man should not be—a 
man I would want for my—” her voice sank very low 
——“husband. Then he is toostrong. My prince must be 
tall, and slender, and dark — a graceful, bewitching prince. 
No, there is no danger of my falling in love with Martin 
Eden. It would be the worst fate that could befall me.” 

“ But it is not that that I spoke about,” her mother 
equivocated. “Have you thought about him? He is so 
ineligible in every way, you know, and suppose he should 
come to love you?” 

‘“‘ But he does — already,” she cried. 

“It was to be expected,” Mrs. Morse said gently. “How 
could it be otherwise with any one who knew you?” 

“Olney hates me!” she exclaimed passionately. “ And 
I hate Olney. I feel always like a cat when he is around. 
I feel that I must be nasty to him, and even when I don’t 
happen to feel that way, why, he’s nasty to me, anyway. 
But I am happy with Martin Eden. No one ever loved 
me before —no man, I mean,in that way. And it is sweet 
to be loved — that way. You know what I mean, mother 
dear. It is sweet to feel that you are really and truly a 
woman.” She buried her face in her mother’s lap, sobbing. 
*“ You think I am dreadful, I know, but I am honest, and 
I tell you just how I feel.” 

Mrs. Morse was strangely sad and happy. Her child- 
daughter, who was a bachelor of arts, was gone; but in her 
place was a woman-daughter. The experiment had suc- 
ceeded. ‘The strange void in Ruth’s nature had been 
filled, and filled without danger or penalty. This rough 
sailor-fellow had been the instrument, and, though Ruth 
did not love him, he had made her conscious of her wom- 
anhood. 

“ His hand trembles,” Ruth was confessing, her face, for 
shame’s sake, still buried. “It is most amusing and ridic- 
ulous, but I feel sorry for him, too. And when his hands 
are too trembly, and his eyes too shiny, why, I lecture him 
about his life and the wrong way he is going about it to 
mend it. But he worships me, I know. His eyes and his 
han¢és do not lie. And it makes me feel grown-up, the 


166 MARTIN EDEN 


thought of it, the very thought of it; and I feel that Iam 
possessed of something that is by rights my own —that 
makes me like the other girls — and —and young women. 
And, then, too, I knew that I was not like them before, 
and I knew that it worried you. You thought you did not 
let me know that dear worry of yours, but I did, and I 
wanted to —‘ to make good,’ as Martin Eden says.” 

It was a holy hour for mother and daughter, and their 
eyes were wet as they talked on in the twilight, Ruth all 
white innocence and frankness, her mother sympathetic, 
receptive, yet calmly explaining and guiding. 

‘‘ He is four years younger than you,” she said. “He 
has no place in the world. He has neither position nor 
salary. He is impractical. Loving you, he should, in the 
name of common sense, be doing something that would 
give him the right to marry, instead of paltering around 
with those stories of his and with childish dreams. Mar- 
tin Eden, I am afraid, will never grow up. He does not 
take to responsibility and a man’s work in the world like 
your father did, or like all our friends, Mr. Butler for one. 
Martin Eden, I am afraid, will never be a money-earner. 
And this world is so ordered that money is necessary to 
“ happiness — oh, no, not these swollen fortunes, but enough 
of money to permit of common comfort and decency. He 
—he has never spoken ?”’ 

“He has not breathed a word. He has not attempted 
to; but if he did, I would not let him, because, you see, I 
do not love him.” 

“T am glad of that. I should not care to see my 
daughter, my one daughter, who is so clean and pure, love 
aman like him. ‘There are noble men in the world who 
are clean and true and manly. Waitforthem. You will 
find one some day, and you will love him and be loved by 
him, and you will be happy with him as your father and I 
have been happy with each other. And there is one thing 
you must always carry in mind —” : 

“Yes, mother.” | 

Mrs. Morse’s voice was low and sweet as she said, “ And 
that is the children.” 


MARTIN EDEN 167 


“J — have thought about them,” Ruth confessed, re- 
membering the wanton thoughts that had vexed her in the 
past, her face again red with maiden shame that she should 
be telling such things. 

“And it is that, the children, that makes Mr. Eden im- 
possible,” Mrs. Morse went on incisively. ‘“ Their heritage 
must be clean, and he is, I am afraid, not clean. Your 
father has told me of sailors’ lives, and — and you under- 
stand.” 

Ruth pressed her mother’s hand in assent, feeling that 
she really did understand, though her conception was of 
something vague, remote, and terrible that was beyond the 
scope of imagination. 

“You know I do nothing without telling you,” she 
began. ‘“— Only, sometimes you must ask me, like this 
time. I wanted to tell you, but I did not know how. It 
is false modesty, I know it is that, but you can make it 
easy for me. Sometimes, like this time, you must ask me, 
you must give me a chance. 

“ Why, mother, you are a woman, too!” she cried ex- 
ultantly, as they stood up, catching her mother’s hands and 
standing erect, facing her in the twilight, conscious of a 
strangely sweet equality between them. “I should never 
have thought of you in that way if we had not had this 
talk. I had to learn that I was a woman to know that you 
were one, too.” 

“We are women together,” her mother said, drawing 
her to her and kissing her. ‘ We are women together,” 
she repeated, as they went out of the room, their arms 
around each other’s waists, their hearts swelling with a 
new sense of companionship. 

“Our little girl has become a woman,” Mrs. Morse said 
proudly to her husband an hour later. 

“That means,” he said, after a long look at his wife, 
“that means she is in love.” 

~ “No, but that she is loved,” was the smiling rejoinder. 
“ The experiment has succeeded. She is awakened at last.” 

“Then we'll have to get rid of him.” Mr. Morse spoke 

briskly, in matter-of-fact, businesslike tones. 


168 MARTIN EDEN 


But his wifeshook her head. ‘It will not be necessary. 
Ruth says he is going to sea in a few days. When he 
comes back, she will not be here. We will send her to 
Aunt Clara’s. And, besides, a year in the East, with the 
change in climate, people, ideas, and everything, is just 
the thing she needs.” 


CHAPTER XX 


THE desire to write was stirring in Martin once more. 
Stories and poems were springing into spontaneous creation 
in his brain, and he made notes of them against the future 
time when he would give them expression. But he did 
not write. This was his little vacation; he had resolved 
to devote it to rest and love, and in both matters he pros- 
pered. He was soon spilling over with vitality, and each 
day he saw Ruth, at the moment of meeting, she experi- 
enced the old shock of his strength and health. 

“ Be careful,” her mother warned her once again. “I 
am afraid you are seeing too much of Martin Eden.” 

But Ruth laughed from security. She was sure of her- 
self, and in a few days he would be off to sea. Then, by 
the time he returned, she would be away on her visit East. 
There was a magic, howevei, in the strength and health of 
Martin. He, too, had been told of her contemplated East- 
ern trip, and he felt the need for haste. Yet he did not 
know how to make love to agirl like Ruth. Then, too, he 
was handicapped by the possession of a great fund of ex- 
perience with girls and women who had been absolutely 
different from her. ‘They had known about love and life 
and flirtation, while she knew nothing about such things. 
Her prodigious innocence appalled him, freezing on his lips 
all ardors of speech, and convincing him, in spite of himself, 
of his own unworthiness. Also he was handicapped in 
another way. He had himself never been in love before. 
He had liked women in that turgid past of his, and been 
fascinated by some of them, but he had not known what it 
was to love them. He had whistled in a masterful, care- 
less way, and they had come to him. They had been 
diversions, incidents, part of the game men play, but a 
small part at most. And now, and for the first time, he 

169 


170 MARTIN EDEN 


was a suppliant, tender and timid and doubting. He did 
not know the way of love, nor its speech, while he was 
frightened at his loved one’s clear innocence. 

In the course of getting acquainted with a varied world, 
whirling on through the ever changing phases of it, he had 
learned a rule of conduct which was to the effect that when 
one played a strange game, he should let the other fellow 
play first. This had stood him in good stead a thousand 
times and trained him as an observer as well. He knew 
how to watch the thing that was strange, and to wait for 
a weakness, for a place of entrance, to divulge itself. It 
was like sparring for an opening in fist-fighting. And 
when such an opening came, he knew by long experience 
to play for it and to play hard. 

So he waited with Ruth and watched, desiring to speak 
his love but not daring. He was afraid of shocking her, 
and he was not sure of himself. Had he but known it, 
he was following the right course with her. Love came 
into the world before articulate speech, and in its own 
early youth it had learned ways and means that it had 
never forgotten. It was in this old, primitive way that 
Martin wooed Ruth. He did not know he was doing it 
at first, though later he divined it. The touch of his 
hand on hers was vastly more potent than any word he 
could utter, the impact of his strength on her imagination 
was more alluring than the printed poems and spoken 
passions of a thousand generations of lovers. Whatever 
his tongue could express would have appealed, in part, to 
. her judgment; but the touch of hand, the fleeting con- 
tact, made its way directly to her instinct. Her judg- 
“ment was as young as she, but her instincts were as old 
as the race and older. They had been young when love 
was young, and they were wiser than convention and 
Opinion and all the new-born things. So her judgment 
did not act. There was no call upon it, and she did 
not realize the strength of the appeal Martin made from 
moment to moment to her love-nature. That he loved 
her, on the other hand, was as clear as day, and she con- 
sciously delighted in beholding his love-manifestations — 


MARTIN EDEN ~ LF 


the glowing eyes with their tender lights, the trembling 
hands, and the never failing swarthy flush that flooded 
darkly under his sunburn. She even went farther, in a 
timid way inciting him, but doing it so delicately that 
he never suspected, and doing it half-consciously, so that 
she scarcely suspected herself. She thrilled with ‘these 
proofs of her power that proclaimed her a woman, and 
she took an Eve-like delight in tormenting him and 
playing upon him. 

Tongue-tied by inexperience and by excess of ardor, 
wooing unwittingly and awkwardly, Martin continued his 
approach by contact. The touch of his hand was pleasant 
to her, and something deliciously more than pleasant. 
Martin did not know it, but he did know that it was not 
distasteful to her. Not that they touched hands often, 
save at meeting and parting; but that in handling the 
bicycles, in strapping on the books of verse they carried 
into the hills, and in conning the pages of books side by 
side, there were opportunities for hand to stray against 
hand. And there were opportunities, too, for her hair to 
brush his cheek, and for shoulder to touch shoulder, as 
they leaned together over the beauty of the books. She 
smiled to herself at vagrant impulses which arose from 
nowhere and suggested that she rumple his hair; while 
he desired greatly, when they tired of reading, to rest his 
head in her lap and dream with closed eyes about the 
future that was to be theirs. On Sunday picnics at 
Shellmound Park and Schuetzen Park, in the past, he 
had rested his head on many laps, and, usually, he had 
slept soundly and selfishly while the girls shaded his face 
from the sun and looked down and loved him and won- 
dered at his lordly carelessness of their love. To rest his 
head in a girl’s lap had been the easiest thing in the world 
until now, and now he found Ruth’s lap inaccessible and 
impossible. Yet it was right here, in his reticence, that 
the strength of his wooing lay. It was because of this 
reticence that he never alarmed her. Herself fastidious 
and timid, she never awakened to the perilous trend of 
their intercourse. Subtly and unaware she grew toward 


172 MARTIN EDEN 


him and closer to him, while he, sensing the growing close- 
ness, longed to dare but was afraid. 

Once he dared, one afternoon, when he found her in the 
darkened living room with a blinding headache. 

“ Nothing can do it any good,” she had answered his 
inquiries. ‘And besides, I don’t take headache powders. 
Doctor Hall won’t permit me.” 

“JT can cure it, I think, and without drugs,” was Mar- 
tin’s answer. ‘I am not sure, of course, but I’d like to 
try. It’ssimply massage. I learned the trick first from 
the Japanese. ‘They are a race of masseurs, you know. 
Then I learned it all over again with variations from the 
Hawaiians. They call it lomi-lom. It can accomplish 
most of the things drugs accomplish and a few things 
that drugs can’t.” 

Scarcely had his hands touched her head when she 
sighed deeply. 

“ That is so good,” she said. 

She spoke once again, half an hour later, when she 
asked, “ Aren’t you tired ?”’ 

The question was perfunctory, and she knew what the 
answer would be. ‘Then she lost herself in drowsy con- 
templation of the soothing balm of his strength. Life 
poured from the ends of his fingers, driving the pain 
before it, or so it seemed to her, until with the easement 
of pain, she fell asleep and he stole away. 

She called him up by telephone that evening to thank 
him. 

“YT slept until dinner,” she said. “ You cured me com- 
pletely, Mr. Eden, and I don’t know how to thank you.” 

He was warm, and bungling of speech, and very happy, 
as he replied to her, and there was dancing in his mind, 
throughout the telephone conversation, the memory of 
Browning and of sickly Elizabeth Barrett. What had 
been done could be done again, and he, Martin Eden, 
could do it and would do it for Ruth Morse. He went 
back to his room and to the volume of Spencer’s “ Sociol- 
ogy” lying open on the bed. But he could not read. 
Love tormented him and overrode his will, so that, de- 


MARTIN EDEN 173 


spite all determination, he found himself at the little ink- 
stained table. The sonnet he composed that night was 
the first of a love-cycle of fifty sonnets which was com- 
pleted within two months. He had the “ Love-sonnets 
from the Portuguese” in mind as he wrote, and he wrote 
under the best conditions for great work, at a climacteric 
of living, in the throes of his own sweet love-madness. 

The many hours he was not with Ruth he devoted to 
the “ Love-cycle,” to reading at home, or to the public 
reading-rooms, where he got more closely in touch with 
the magazines of the day and the nature of their policy 
and content. The hours he spent with Ruth were mad- 
dening alike in promise and in inconclusiveness. It was 
a week after he cured her headache that a moonlight sail 
on Lake Merritt was proposed by Norman and seconded 
by Arthur and Olney. Martin was the only one capable 
of handling a boat, and he was pressed into service. Ruth 
sat near him in the stern, while the three young fellows 
lounged amidships, deep in a wordy wrangle over “frat” 
affairs. 

The moon had not yet risen, and Ruth, gazing into the 
starry vault of the sky and exchanging no speech with 
Martin, experienced a sudden feeling of loneliness. She 
glanced at him. A puff of wind was heeling the boat 
over till the deck was awash, and he, one hand on tiller 
and the other on main-sheet, was luffing slightly, at the 
same time peering ahead to make out the near-lying north 
shore. He was unaware of her gaze, and she watched 
him intently, speculating fancifully about the strange 
warp of soul that led him, a young man with signal 
powers, to fritter away his time on the writing of stories 
and poems foredoomed to mediocrity and failure. 

Her eyes wandered along the strong throat, dimly seen 
in the starlight, and over the firm-poised head, and the old 
desire to lay her hands upon his neck came back to her. 
The strength she abhorred attracted her. Her feeling of 
loneliness became more pronounced, and she felt tired. 
Her position on the heeling boat irked her, and she re- 
membered the headache he had cured and the soothing 


174 MARTIN EDEN 


rest that resided in him. He was sitting beside her, quite 
beside her, and the boat seemed to tilt her toward him. 
Then arose in her the impulse to lean against him, to rest 
herself against his strength — a vague, half-formed impulse, 
which, even as she considered it, mastered her and made 
her lean toward him. Or was it the heeling of the boat ? 
She did not know. She never knew. She knew only that 
she was leaning against him and that the easement and 
soothing rest were very good. Perhaps it had been the 
boat’s fault, but she made no effort to retrieve it. She 
leaned lightly against his shoulder, but she leaned, and 
she continued to lean when he shifted his position to 
make it more comfortable for her. 

It was a madness, but she refused to consider the mad- 
ness. She was no longer herself but a woman, with a 
woman’s clinging need; and though she leaned ever so 
lightly, the need seemed satisfied. She was no longer 
tired. Martin did not speak. Had he, the spell would 
have been broken. But his reticence of love prolonged 
it. He was dazed and dizzy. He could not understand 
what was happening. It was too wonderful to be any- 
thing but a delirium. He conquered a mad desire to let 
go sheet and tiller and to clasp her in hisarms. His intui- 
tion told him it was the wrong thing to do, and he was 
glad that sheet and tiller kept his hands occupied and 
fended off temptation. But he luffed the boat less deli- 
cately, spilling the wind shamelessly from the sail so as 
to prolong the tack to the north shore. ‘The shore would 
compel him to go about, and the contact would be broken. 
He sailed with skill, stopping way on the boat without 
exciting the notice of the wranglers, and mentally forgiv- 
ing his hardest voyages in that they had made this marvel- 
lous night possible, giving him mastery over sea and boat 
and wind so that he could sail with her beside him, her 
dear weight against him on his shoulder. 

When the first light of the rising moon touched the sail, 
illuminating the boat with pearly radiance, Ruth moved 
away from him. And, even as she moved, she felt him 
move away. The impulse to avoid detection was mutual. 


MARTIN EDEN 175 


The episode was tacitly and secretly intimate. She sat 
apart from him with burning cheeks, while the full force 
of it came home to her. She had been guilty of something 
she would not have her brothers see, nor Olney see. Why 
had she done it? She had never done anything like it in 
her life, and yet she had been moonlight-sailing with 
young men before. She had never desired to do anything 
like it. She was overcome with shame and with the mys- 
tery of her own burgeoning womanhood. She stole a glance 
at Martin, who was busy putting the boat about on the other 
tack, and she could have hated him for having made her do 
an immodest and shameful thing. And he, of all men! 
Perhaps her mother was right, and she was seeing too much 
of him. It would never happen again, she resolved, and 
she would see less of him in the future. She entertained 
a wild idea of explaining to him the first time they were 
alone together, of lying to him, of mentioning casually the 
attack of faintness that had overpowered her just before 
the moon came up. ‘Then she remembered how they had 
drawn mutually away before the revealing moon, and she 
knew he would know it for a lie. 

In the days that swiftly Tollowed she was no longer her- 
self but a strange, puzzling creature, wilful over judgment 
and scornful of self-analysis, refusing to peer into the fu- 
ture or to think about herself and whither she was drifting. 
She was in a fever of tingling mystery, alternately fright- 
ened and charmed, and in constant bewilderment. She 
had one idea firmly fixed, however, which insured her se- 
curity. She would not let Martin speak hislove. As long 
as she did this, all would be well. Ina few days he would 
be off to sea. And even if he did speak, all would be well. 
It could not be otherwise, for she did not love him. Of 
course, it would be a painful half hour for him, and an 
embarrassing half hour for her, because it would be her 
first proposal. She thrilled deliciously at the thought. 
She was really a woman, with a man ripe to ask for her 
in marriage. It was a lure to all that was fundamental in 
her sex. The fabric of her life, of all that constituted her, 
quivered and grew tremulous. The thought fluttered in 


176 MARTIN EDEN 


her mind like a flame-attracted moth. She went so far as 
to imagine Martin proposing, herself putting the words 
into his mouth; and she rehearsed her refusal, tempering 
it with kindness and exhorting him to true and noble man- 
hood. And especially he must stop smoking cigarettes. 
She would make a point of that. But no, she must not 
let him speak at all. She could stop him, and she had 
told her mother that she would. All flushed and burning, 
she regretfully dismissed the conjured situation. Her 
first proposal would have to be deferred to a more pro- 
pitious time and a more eligible suitor. 


CHAPTER XXI 


CAME a beautiful fall day, warm and languid, palpitant 
with the hush of the changing season, a California Indian 
summer day, with hazy sun and wandering wisps. of 
breeze that did not stir the slumber of the air. Filmy 
purple mists, that were not vapors but fabrics woven of 
color, hid in the recesses of the hills. San Francisco lay 
like a blur of smoke upon her heights. The intervening 
bay was a dull sheen of molten metal, whereon sailing craft 
lay motionless or drifted with the lazy tide. Far Tamal- 
pais, barely seen in the silver haze, bulked hugely by the 
Golden Gate, the latter a pale gold pathway under the 
westering sun. Beyond, the Pacific, dim and vast, was 
raising on its sky-line tumbled cloud-masses that swept 
landward, giving warning of the first blustering breath of 
winter. 

The erasure of summer was at hand. Yet summer 
lingered, fading and fainting among her hills, deepening 
the purple of her valleys, spinning a shroud of haze from 
waning powers and sated raptures, dying with the calm 
content of having lived and lived well. And among the 
hills, on their favorite knoll, Martin and Ruth sat side by 
side, their heads bent over the same pages, he reading 
aloud from the love-sonnets of the woman who had loved 
Browning as it is given to few men to be loved. 

But the reading languished. The spell of passing 
beauty all about them was too strong. The golden year | 
was dying as it had lived, a beautiful and unrepentant 
voluptuary, and reminiscent rapture and content freighted 
heavily the air. It entered into them, dreamy and lan- 
guorous, weakening the fibres of resolution, suffusing the 
face of morality, or of judgment, with haze and purple 
mist. Martin felt tender and melting, and from time to 

N 177 


178 MARTIN EDEN 


time warm glows passed over him. His head was very 
near to hers, and when wandering phantoms of breeze 
stirred her hair so that it touched his face, the printed 
pages swam before his eyes. 

“IT don’t believe you know a word of what you are read- 
ing,” she said once when he had lost his place. 

He looked at her with burning eyes, and was on the 
verge of becoming awkward, when a retort came to his 
lips. 

7” I don’t believe you know either. What was the last 
sonnet about ?”’ 

“JT don’t know,” she laughed frankly. “Ive already 
forgotten. Don’t let us read any more. The day is too 
beautiful.” 

‘Tt will be our last in the hills for some time,” he an- 
nounced gravely. ‘ There’s a storm gathering out there 
on the sea-rim.” 

The book slipped from his hands to the ground, and 
they sat idly and silently, gazing out over the dreamy bay 
with eyes that dreamed and did not see. Ruth glanced 
sidewise at his neck. She did not lean toward him. She 
was drawn by some force outside of herself and stronger 
than gravitation, strong as destiny. It was only an inch 
to lean, and it was accomplished without volition on her 
part. Her shoulder touched his as lightly as a butterfly 
touches a flower, and just as lightly was the counter-press- 
ure. She felt his shoulder press hers, and a tremor run 
through him. ‘Then was the time for her to draw back. 
But she had become an automaton. Her actions had 
passed beyond the control of her will— she never thought of 
control or will in the delicious madness that was upon her. 
His arm began to steal behind her and around her. She 
waited its slow progress in a torment of delight. She 
waited, she knew not for what, panting, with dry, burn- 
ing lips, a leaping pulse, and a fever of expectancy in all 
her blood. The girdling arm lifted higher and drew her 
toward him, drew her slowly and caressingly. She could 
wait no longer. With a tired sigh, and with an impulsive 
movement all her own, unpremeditated, spasmodic, she 


MARTIN EDEN 179 


rested her head upon his breast. His head bent over 
swiftly, and, as his lips approached, hers flew to meet them. 

This must be love, she thought, in the one rational mo- 
ment that was vouchsafed her. If it was not love, it was 
too shameful. It could be nothing else than love. She 
loved the man whose arms were around her and whose 
lips were pressed to hers. She pressed more tightly to 
him, with a snuggling movement of her body. And a 
moment later, tearing herself half out of his embrace, sud- 
denly and exultantly she reached up and placed both 
hands upon Martin Eden’s sunburnt neck. So exquisite 
was the pang of love and desire fulfilled that she uttered 
a low moan, relaxed her hands, and lay half-swooning in 
his arms. 

Not a word had been spoken, and not a word was spoken 
for a long time. Twice he bent and kissed her, and each 
time her lips met his shyly and her body made its happy, 
nestling movement. She clung to him, unable to release 
herself, and he sat, half supporting her in his arms, as he 
gazed with unseeing eyes at the blur of the great city 
across the bay. For once there were no visions in his 
brain. Only colors and lights and glows pulsed there, 
warm as the day and warm as his love. He bent over 
her. She was speaking. 

*“ When did you love me?” she whispered. 

‘¢ From the first, the very first, the first moment I laid 
eyes on you. IJ was mad for love of you then, and in all 
the time that has passed since then I have only grown the 
madder. I am maddest, now, dear. I am almost a lunatic, 
my head is so turned with joy.” 

“JT am glad I am a woman, Martin — dear,” she said, 
after a long sigh. 

He crushed her in his arms again and again, and then 
asked : — 

“And you? When did you first know? ” 

‘Oh, I knew it all the time, almost from the first.” 

‘And I have been as blind as a bat!” he cried, a ring 
of vexation in his voice. ‘I never dreamed it until just 
now, when I — when I kissed you.” 


180 MARTIN EDEN 


‘JT didn’t mean that.”’ She drew herself partly away 
and looked at him. “I meant I knew you loved me 
almost from the first.” 

“And you?” he demanded. 

“It came to me suddenly.” She was speaking very 
slowly, her eyes warm and fluttery and melting, a soft 
flush on her cheeks that did not go away. “I never knew 
until just now when — you put your arms around me. 
And I never expected to marry you, Martin, not until just 
now. How did you make me love you?” 

“JT don’t know,” he laughed, “unless just by loving 
you, for I loved you hard enough to melt the heart of a 
stone, much less the heart of the living, breathing woman 
you are.” 

“This is so different from what I thought love would 
be,” she announced irrelevantly. 

“ What did you think it would be like?” 

“T.didn’t think it would be like this.” She was looking 
into his eyes at the moment, but her own dropped as she 
continued, ** You see, I didn’t know what this was like.” 

He offered to draw her toward him again, but it was no 
more than a tentative muscular movement of the girdling 
arm, for he feared that he might be greedy. Then he 
felt her body yielding, and once again she was close in his 
arms and lips were pressed on lips. 

“ What will my people say?” she queried, with sudden 
apprehension, in one of the pauses. 

“T don’t know. We can find out very easily any time 
we are so minded.” 

é ‘But if mamma objects? Iam sure I am afraid to tell 
Orsi 

“Let me tell her,” he volunteered valiantly. “I think 
your mother does not like me, but I can win her around. 
A fellow who can win you can win anything. And if we 
don’t inde 

Yes? 77 

“ Why, we'll have each other. But there’s no danger 
of not winning your mother to our marriage. She loves 
you too well.” 


MARTIN EDEN 181 


“I should not like to break her heart,” Ruth said 
pensively. 

He felt like assuring her that mothers’ hearts were not 
so easily broken, but instead he said, “ And love is the 
greatest thing in the world.” 

“ Do you know, Martin, you sometimes frighten me. I 
am frightened now, when I think of you and of what you 
have been. You must be very, very good tome. Remem- 
member, after all, that I am only a child. I never loved 
before.” 

“Nor I. We are both children together. And we are 
fortunate above most, for we have found our first love in 
each other.” 

“ But that is impossible!” she cried, withdrawing her- 
self from his arms with a swift, passionate movement. 
‘Impossible for you. You have been a sailor, and sail- 
ors, I have heard, are — are —”’ 

Her voice faltered and died away. 

“ Are addicted to having a wife in every port?” he 
suggested. “Ts that what you mean?” 

“Yes,” she answered in a-,low voice. 

«But that is not love.” He spoke authoritatively. “I 
have been in many ports, but I never knew a passing touch 
of love until I saw you that first night. Do you know, 
when I said good night and went away, I was almost 
arrested,” 

“ Arrested ?”’ 

“Yes. The policeman thought I was drunk; and I 
was, too — with love for you. 

“But you said we were children, and I atid it was 
impossible, for you, and we have strayed away from the 
point.” 

“JT said that I never loved anybody but you,” he re- 
pled. ‘“ You are my first, my very first.” 

“ And yet you have been a sailor,” she objected. 

*“ But that doesn’t prevent me from loving you the 
first.” 

“And there have been women — other women — oh!”’ 

And to Martin Eden’s supreme surprise, she burst into a 


182 “MARTIN EDEN’ 


storm of tears that took more kisses than one and many 
caresses to drive away. And all the while there was 
running through his head Kipling’s line: “ And the Colo- 
nel’s lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under their skins.” 
It was true, he decided; though the novels he had read had 
led him to believe otherwise. His idea, for which the 
novels were responsible, had been that only formal pro- 
~ posals obtained in the upper classes. It was all right 
enough, down whence he had come, for youths and 
maidens to win each other by contact; but for the exalted 
personages up above on the heights to make love in similar 
fashion had seemed unthinkable. Yet the novels were 
~ wrong. Here was a proof of it. The same pressures and 
caresses, unaccompanied by speech, that were efficacious 
with the girls of the working-class, were equally effica- 
cious with the girls above the working-class. ‘They were 
all of the same flesh, after all, sisters under their skins; 
and he might have known as much himself had he remem- 
bered his Spencer. As he held Ruth in his arms and 
soothed her, he took great consolation in the thought that 
the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady were pretty much 
alike under their skins. It brought Ruth closer to him, 
made her possible. Her dear flesh was as anybody’s flesh, 
as his flesh. ‘There was no bar to their marriage. Class 
difference was the only difference, and class was extrinsic. 
It could be shaken off. A slave, he had read, had risen to 
the Roman purple. That being so, then he could rise to 
Ruth. Under her purity, and saintliness, and culture, 
and ethereal beauty of soul, she was, in things fundamen- 
tally human, just like Lizzie Connolly and all Lizzie Con- 
nollys. All that was possible of them was possible of her. 
She could love, and hate, maybe have hysterics ; and she 
could certainly be jealous, as she was jealous now, uttering 
her last sobs in his arms. 

“ Besides, I am older than you,” she remarked suddenly, 
opening her eyes and looking up at him, “three years 
older.” 

“ Hush, you are only a child, and I am forty years older 
than you, in experience,” was his answer. 


ie 


~~ 


MARTIN EDEN 183 


In truth, they were children together, so far as love 
was concerned, and they were as naive and immature in 
the expression of their love as a pair of children, and this 
despite the fact that she was crammed with a university 
education and that his head was full of scientific philoso- 
phy and the hard facts of life. 

They sat on through the passing glory of the day, talking 
as lovers are prone to talk, marvelling at the wonder of 
love and at destiny that had flung them so strangely 
together, and dogmatically believing that they loved toa 
degree never attained by lovers before. And they re- 
turned insistently, again and again, to a rehearsal of their 
first impressions of each other and to hopeless attempts to 
analyze just precisely what they felt for each other and 
how much there was of it. 

The cloud-masses on the western horizon received the 
descending sun, and the circle of the sky turned to rose, 
while the zenith glowed with the same warm color. The 
rosy ight was all about them, flooding over them, as she 
sang, ** Good-by, Sweet Day.” She sang softly, leaning 
in the cradle of his arm, her hands in his, their hearts in 
each other’s hands. 


CHAPTER XXIL 


Mrs. Morsk did not require a mother’s intuition to read 
the advertisement in Ruth’s face when she returned home. 
The flush that would not leave the cheeks told the simple 
story, and more eloquently did the eyes, large and bright, 
reflecting an unmistakable inward glory. 

‘What has happened?” Mrs. Morse asked, having 
bided her time till Ruth had gone to bed. 

“You know?” Ruth queried, with trembling lips. 

For reply, her mother’s arm went around her, and a 
hand was softly caressing her hair. 

“ He did not speak,” she blurted out. “I did not in- 
tend that it should happen, and I would never have let 
him speak — only he didn’t speak.” 

“ But if he did not speak, then nothing could have hap- 
pened, could it ?”’ 

“ But it did, just the same.”’ 

‘In the name of goodness, child, what are you babbling 
about?” Mrs. Morse was bewildered. ‘I don’t think I 
know what happened, after all. What did happen?” 

Ruth looked at her mother in surprise. 

“TI thought you knew. Why, we’re engaged, Martin 
and I.” 

Mrs. Morse laughed with incredulous vexation. 

‘No, he didn’t speak,” Ruth explained. ‘“ He just loved 
me, that was all. I was as surprised as you are. He 
didn’t saya word. He just puthisarmaroundme. And 
—and I was not myself. And he kissed me, and I kissed 
him. I couldn’t help it. I just had to. And then I 
knew I loved him.” 

She paused, waiting with expectancy the benediction of 
her mother’s kiss, but Mrs. Morse was coldly silent. 

184 


MARTIN EDEN , 185 


“Tt is a dreadful accident, I know,” Ruth recommenced 
with a sinking voice. ‘And I don’t know how you will 
ever forgive me. But I couldn’t helpit. I did not dream 
that I loved him until that moment. And you must tell 
father for me.” 

“ Would it not be better not to tell your father? Let 
me see Martin Eden, and talk with him, and explain. 
He will understand and release you.” 

“No! no!” Ruth cried, starting up. “I do not want 
to be released. I love him, and love is very sweet. I 
am going to marry him —of course, if you will let me.” 

‘¢ We have other plans for you, Ruth, dear, your father 
and I—oh, no, no; no man picked out for you, or any- 
thing lke that. Our plans go no farther than your 
marrying some man in your own station in life, a good ° 
and honorable gentleman, whom you will select yourself, 
when you love him.” 

“ But I love Martin already was the plaintive protest. 

“‘ We would not influence your choice in any way; but 
you are our daughter, and we could not bear to see you 
make a marriage such as ‘this. He has nothing but 
roughness and coarseness to offer you in exchange for all 
that is refined and delicate in you. He is no match for 
you in any way. He could not support you. We have 
no foolish ideas about wealth, but comfort is another 


matter, and our daughter should at least marry a man \, | 


who can give her that—and not a penniless adventurer, 
a sailor, a cowboy, a smuggler, and Heaven knows what 
else, who, in addition to everything, is hare-brained and 
irresponsible.” 

Ruth was silent. Every word she recognized as true. 

* He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accom- 
plish what geniuses and rare men with college educations 
sometimes accomplish. A man thinking of marriage 
should be preparing for marriage. But not he. As I 
have said, and I know you agree with me, he is irrespon- 
sible. And why should he not be? It is the way of 
sailors. He has never learned to be economical or tem- 
perate. The spendthrift years have marked him. It is 


186 MARTIN EDEN 


» not his fault, of course, but that does not alter his nature. 
And have you thought of the years of licentiousness 
he inevitably has lived? Have you thought of that, 
daughter? You know what marriage means.” 

Ruth shuddered and clung close to her mother. 

“T have thought.” Ruth waited a long time for the 
thought to frame itself. ‘“ And itis terrible. It sickens 
me to think of it. I told you it was a dreadful accident, 
my loving him; but I can’t help myself. Could you 
help loving father? Then it is the same with me. 
There is something in me, in him—TI never knew it 
was there until to-day — but it is there, and it makes me 
love him. I never thought to love him, but, you see, I 
do,” she concluded, a certain faint triumph in her voice. 

They talked long, and to little purpose, in conclusion 
agreeing to wait an indeterminate time without doing 
anything. 

The same conclusion was reached, a little later that 
night, between Mrs. Morse and her husband, after she 
had made due confession of the miscarriage of her plans. 

“Tt could hardly have come otherwise,” was Mr. Morse’s 
judgment. ‘This sailor-fellow has been the only man she 
was in touch with. Sooner or later she was going to 
awaken anyway ; and she did awaken, and lo! here was 
this sailor-fellow, the only accessible man at the moment, 
and of course she promptly loved him, or thought she 
did, which amounts to the same thing.” 

Mrs. Morse took it upon herself to work slowly and in- 
directly upon Ruth, rather than to combat her. There 
would be plenty of time for this, for Martin was not in 
position to marry. 

‘Let her see all she wants of him,” was Mr. Morse’s 
advice. ‘The more she knows him, the less she’ll love 
him, I wager. And give her plenty of contrast. Make 
a point of having young people at the house. Young 
women and young men, all sorts of young men, clever 
._ men, men who have done something or who are doing 
“things, men of her own class, gentlemen. She can gauge 
him by them. ‘They will show him up for what he is. 


MARTIN EDEN 187 


And after all, he is a mere boy of twenty-one. Ruth is _ 
no more than a child. It is calf love with the pair of * 
them, and they will grow out of it.” 

So the matter rested. Within the family it was ac- 
cepted that Ruth and Martin were engaged, but no an- 
nouncement was made. The family did not think it 
would ever be necessary. Also, it was tacitly under- 
stood that it was to be a long engagement. They did 
not ask Martin to go to work, nor to cease writing. 
They did not intend to encourage him to mend himself. 
And he aided and abetted them in their unfriendly de- 
signs, for going to work was farthest from his thoughts. 

“‘T wonder if you'll like what I have done!” he said to 
Ruth several days later. “I’ve decided that boarding 
with my sister is too expensive, and I am going to board 
myself. Ive rented a little room out in North Oakland, 
retired neighborhood and all the rest, you know, and I’ve 
bought an oil-burner on which to cook.” 

Ruth was overjoyed. The oil-burner especially pleased 
her. 

“That was the way Mr. Butler began his start,” she said. 

Martin frowned inwardly at the citation of that worthy 
gentleman, and went on: “I put stamps on all my manu- 
scripts and started them off to the editors again. Then 
to-day I moved in, and to-morrow I start to work.” 

“ A position!” she cried, betraying the gladness of her 
surprise in all her body, nestling closer to him, pressing 
his hand, smiling. ‘“ And you never told me! What is 
res) i 

He shook his head. 

“IT meant that I was going to work at my writing.” 
‘Her face fell, and he went on hastily. ‘Don’t misjudge 
me. I am not going in this time with any iridescent ideas. 
It is to be a cold, prosaic, matter-of-fact business proposi- 
tion. It is better than going to sea again, and I shall 
earn more money than any position in Oakland can bring 
an unskilled man. 

“You see, this vacation I have taken has given me perspec- 
tive. I haven’t been working the life out of my body, and I 


188 MARTIN EDEN 


haven’t been writing, at least not for publication. AllI’ve 
done has been to love you and to think. I’ve read some, 
too, but it has been part of my thinking, and I have read 
principally magazines. I have generalized about myself, 
and the world, my place in it, and my chance to win toa 
place that will be fit for you. Also, ve been reading 
Spencer’s ‘Philosophy of Style,’ and found out a lot of 
what was the matter with me — or my writing, rather; 
and for that matter with most of the writing that is pub- 
lished every month in the magazines. 

“ But the upshot of it all— of my thinking and reading 
and loving — is that Iam going to move to Grub Street. 
I shall leave masterpieces alone and do hack-work — jokes, 
paragraphs, feature articles, humorous verse, and society 
verse —all the rot for which there seems so much demand. 
Then there are the newspaper syndicates, and the newspaper 
short-story syndicates, and the syndicates for the Sunday 
supplements. I can go ahead and hammer out the stuff they 
want, and earn the equivalent of a good salary by it. There 
are free-lances, you know, who earn as muchas four or five 
hundred a month. Idon’t careto become as they; but ’ 
earn a good living,and have plenty of time to myself, 
which I wouldn’t have in any position. 

“Then, Pll have my spare time for study and for real 
work. In between the grind [ll try my hand at master- 
pieces, and I’ll study and prepare myself for the writing of 
masterpieces. Why, I am amazed at the distance I have 
comealready. When I first tried to write, I had nothing to 
write about except a few paltry experiences which I neither 
understood nor appreciated. But I had no thoughts. I 
really didn’t. I didn’t even have the words with which to 
think. My experiences were so many meaningless pic- 
tures. But as I began to add to my knowledge, and to my 
vocabulary, I saw something more in my experiences than 
mere pictures. JI retained the pictures and I found their 
interpretation. That was when I began to do good work, 
when I wrote ‘ Adventure,’ ‘Joy,’ ‘The Pot,’ ‘The Wine 
of Life,’ ‘The Jostling Street,’ the ‘ Love-cycle,’ and the 
‘Sea Lyrics.’ I shall write more like them, and better; 


MARTIN EDEN 189 


but I shall do it in my spare time. My feet are on the , 
solid earth, now. Hack-work and income first, master- \/ 
pieces afterward. Just to show you, I wrote half a dozen 
jokes last night for the comic weeklies; and just as I was 
going to bed, the thought struck me to try my hand ata 
triolet — a humorous one; and inside an hour I had 
written four. They ought to be worth a dollar apiece. 
Four dollars right there for a few afterthoughts on the 
way to bed. 

“ Of course it’s all valueless, just so much dull and sor- 
did plodding; but it is no more dull and sordid than 
keeping books at sixty dollars a month, adding up endless 
columns of meaningless figures until one dies. And 
furthermore, the hack-work keeps me in touch with things 
literary and gives me time to try bigger things.” 

“ But what good are these bigger things, these master- 
pieces?” Ruth demanded. ‘You can’t sell them.” 

“Oh, yes, I can,” he began; but she interrupted. 

“ All those you named, and which you say yourself are 
good — you have not sold any of them. We can’t get 
married on masterpieces that won’t sell.” 

“Then we'll get married on triolets that will sell,” he 
asserted stoutly, putting his arm around her and drawing 
a very unresponsive sweetheart toward him. 

“ Listen to this,” he went on in attempted gayety. “It’s 
not art, but it’s a dollar. 


“ He came in 
When I was out, 
To borrow some tin 
Was why he came in, 
And he went without; 
So I was in 
And he was out.” 


The merry lilt with which he had invested the jingle 
was at variance with the dejection that came into his face 
as he finished. He had drawn no smile from Ruth. She 
was looking at him in an earnest and troubled way. 

“It may be a dollar,” she said, “ but it is a jester’s dol- 
lar, the fee of a clown. Don’t you see, Martin, the whole 


190 MARTIN EDEN 


thing is lowering. I want the man I love and honor to 
be something finer and higher than a perpetrator of jokes 
and doggerel.”’ 

“You want him to be like—say Mr. Butler?” he sug- 
gested. 

“T know you don’t like Mr. Butler,” she began. 

‘Mr. Butler’s all right,” heinterrupted. ‘It’s only his 
indigestion I find fault with. But to save me I can’t see 
any difference between writing jokes or comic verse and 
running a type-writer, taking dictation, or keeping sets of 
books. Itis alla means to anend. Your theory is for 
me to begin with keeping books in order to become a suc- 
cessful lawyer or man of business. Mine is to begin with 
hack-work and develop into an able author.” 

‘‘ There is a difference,”’ she insisted. 

“ What is it?” 

“Why, your good work, what you yourself call good, 
you can’t sell. You have tried,—you know that,— but 
the editors won’t buy it.” 

“Give me time, dear,” he pleaded. ‘“ The hack-work is 
only makeshift, and I don’t take it seriously. Give me 
two years. I shall succeed in that time, and the editors 
will be glad to buy my good work. I know what I am 
saying; I have faith in myself. I know what I have in me; 
I know what literature is, now; I know the average rot that 
is poured out by a lot of little men; and I know that at 
the end of two years I shall be on the highroad to success. 


_ As for business, I shall never succeed at it. JI am not in 


sympathy withit. It strikes me as dull, and stupid, and 
mercenary, and tricky. Anyway I am not adapted for it. 
I'd never get beyond a clerkship, and how could you and I 
be happy on the paltry earnings of a clerk? I want the 
best of everything in the world for you, and the only time 
when I won’t want it will be when there is something bet- 


«ter. And I’m going to get it, going to get all of it. The 


income of a successful author makes Mr. Butler look cheap. 


A ‘ best-selier’ will earn anywhere between fifty and a hun- 
dred thousand dollars — sometimes more and sometimes 
less; but, as a rule, pretty close to those figures.” 


MARTIN EDEN 191 


She remained silent; her disappointment was apparent. 

“ Well?” he asked. 

“T had hoped and planned otherwise. I had thought, 
and I still think, that the best thing for you would be to 
study shorthand — you already know type-writing — and 
go into father’s office. You have a good mind, and I am 
confident you would succeed as a lawyer.” 


CHAPTER XXIII 


THAT Ruth had little faith in his power as a writer, 
did not alter her nor diminish her in Martin’s eyes. In 
the breathing spell of the vacation he had taken, he had 
spent many hours in self-analysis, and thereby learned 
much of himself. He had discovered that he loved beauty 
more than fame, and that what desire he had for fame was 


*” largely for Ruth’s sake. It was for this reason that his 


desire for fame was strong. He wanted to be great in the 
world’s eyes; ‘to make good,” as he expressed it, in order 
that the woman he loved should be proud of him and 
deem him worthy. 

As for himself, he loved beauty passionately, and the 
joy of serving her was to him sufficient wage. And 
more than beauty he loved Ruth. He considered love the 
finest thing in the world. It was love that had worked 
the revolution in him, changing him from an uncouth sailor 
to a student and an artist; therefore, to him, the finest 
and greatest of the three, greater than learning and ar- 
tistry, was love. Already he had discovered that his brain 
went beyond Ruth’s, just as it went beyond the brains of 
her brothers, or the brain of her father. In spite of every 
advantage of university training, and in the face of her 
bachelorship of arts, his power of intellect overshadowed 
hers, and his year or so of self-study and equipment gave 
him a mastery of the affairs of the world and art and life 
that she could never hope to possess. 

All this he realized, but it did not affect his love for 
her, nor her love for him. Love was too fine and noble, 
and he was too loyal a lover for him to besmirch love 
with criticism. What did love have to do with Ruth’s 
divergent views on art, right conduct, the French Revolu- 
tion, or equal suffrage? They were mental processes, but 
love was beyond reason; it was superrational. He could 

192 


% 
x “ 


MARTIN EDEN | 193 


not belittle love. He worshipped it. Love lay on the 
mountain-tops beyond the valley-land of reason. It was 
a sublimated condition of existence, the topmost peak of 
living, and it came rarely. ‘Thanks to the school of scien- 
tific philosophers he favored, he knew the biological 
significance of love; but by a refined process of the same 
scientific reasoning he reached the conclusion that the 
human organism achieved its highest purpose in love, 
that love must not be questioned, but must be accepted as 
the highest guerdon of life. Thus, he considered the lover 
blessed over all creatures, and it was a delight to him to 
think of “ God’s own mad lover,” rising above the things, / 
of earth, above wealth and judgment, public opinion and 
applause, rising above life itself and * dying on a kiss.” 
Much of this Martin had already reasoned out, and 
some of it he reasoned out later. In the meantime he 
worked, taking no recreation except when he went to see 
Ruth, and living like a Spartan. He paid two dollars 
and a half a month rent for the small room he got from 
his Portuguese landlady, Maria Silva, a virago and a 
widow, hard working and harsher tempered, rearing her 
large brood of children somehow, and drowning her sorrow 
and fatigue at irregular intervals in a gallon of the thin, 
sour wine that she bought from the corner grocery and 
saloon for fifteen cents. From detesting her and her foul 
tongue at first, Martin grew to admire her as he observed 
the brave fight she made. ‘There were but four rooms in © 
the little house —three, when Martin’s was subtracted. 
One of these, the parlor, gay with an ingrain carpet and 
dolorous with a funeral card and a death-picture of one of 
her numerous departed babes, was kept strictly for com- 
pany. The blinds were always down, and her barefooted 
tribe was never permitted to enter the sacred precinct 
save on state occasions. She cooked, and all ate, in the 
kitchen, where she likewise washed, starched, and ironed 
clothes on all days of the week except Sunday ; for her 
income came largely from taking in washing from her 
more prosperous neighbors. Remained the bedroom, 
small as the one occupied by Martin, into which she and 
10) 


194 MARTIN EDEN 


her seven little ones crowded and slept. It was an ever- 
lasting miracle to Martin how it was accomplished, and 
from her side of the thin partition he heard nightly every 
detail of the going to bed, the squalls and squabbles, the 
soft chattering, and the sleepy, twittering noises as of 
birds. Another source of income to Maria were her cows, 
two of them, which she milked night and morning and 
which gained a surreptitious livelihood from vacant lots 
and the grass that grew on either side the public side- 
walks, attended always by one or more of her ragged 
boys, whose watchful guardianship consisted chiefly in 
keeping their eyes out for the poundmen. 

In his own small room Martin lived, slept, studied, wrote, 
and kept house. Before the one window, looking out on 
the tiny front porch, was the kitchen table that served as 
desk, library, and type-writing stand. The bed, against 
the rear wall, occupied two-thirds of the total space of the 
room. ‘The table was flanked on one side by a gaudy 
bureau, manufactured for profit and not for service, the 
thin veneer of which was shed day by day. This bureau 
stood in the corner, and in the opposite corner, on the 
table’s other flank, was the kitchen—the oil-stove on a 
dry-goods box, inside of which were dishes and cooking 
utensils, a shelf on the wall for provisions, and a bucket of 
water on the floor. Martin had to carry his water from 
the kitchen sink, there being no tap in his room. On 
days when there was much steam to his cooking, the 
harvest of veneer from the bureau was unusually gener- 
ous. Over the bed, hoisted by a tackle to the ceiling, 
was his bicycle. At first he had tried to keep it in the 
basement; but the tribe of Silva, loosening the bearings 
and puncturing the tires, had driven him out. Next he 
attempted the tiny front porch, until a howling south- 
easter drenched the wheel a night-long. Then he had 
retreated with it to his room and slung it aloft. 

A small closet contained his clothes and the books he 
had accumulated and for which there was no room on the 
table or under the table. Hand in hand with reading, he 
had developed the habit of making notes, and so copiously 


MARTIN EDEN 195 


did he make them that there would have been no existence 
for him in the confined quarters had he not rigged several 
clothes-lines across the room on which the notes were hung. 
Even so, he was crowded until navigating the room was a 
difficult task. He could not open the door without first 
closing the closet door, and vice versa. It was impossible 
for him anywhere to traverse the room in a straight line. 
To go from the door to the head of the bed was a zigzag 
course that he was never quite able to accomplish in the 
dark without collisions, Having settled the difficulty of 
the conflicting doors, he had to steer sharply to the right 
to avoid the kitchen. Next, he sheered to the left, to es- 
cape the foot of the bed; but this sheer, if too generous, 
brought him against the corner of the table. With asud- 
den twitch and lurch, he terminated the sheer and bore off 
to the right along a sort of canal, one bank of which was 
the bed, the other the table. When the one chair in the 
room was at its usual place before the table, the canal was 
unnavigable. When the chair was notin use, it reposed on 
top of the bed, though sometimes he sat on the chair when 
cooking, reading a book while the water boiled, and even 
becoming skilful enough t6 manage a paragraph or two 
while steak was frying. Also, so small was the little 
corner that constituted the kitchen, he was able, sitting 
down, to reach anything he needed. In fact, it was ex- 
pedient to cook sitting down; standing up, he was too 
often in his own way. 

In conjunction with a perfect stomach that could digest 
anything, he possessed knowledge of the various foods that 
were at the same time nutritious and cheap. Pea-soup was 
a common article in his diet, as well as potatoes and beans, 
the latter large and brown and cooked in Mexican style. 
Rice, cooked as American housewives never cook it and 
can never learn to cook it, appeared on Martin’s table at 
least once a day. Dried fruits were less expensive than 
fresh, and he had usually a pot of them, cooked and ready 
at hand, for they took the place of butter on his bread. 
Occasionally he graced his table with a piece of round- 
steak, or with a soup-bone. Coffee, without cream or 


196 MARTIN EDEN 


milk, he had twice a day, in the evening substituting tea ; 
but both coffee and tea were excellently cooked. 

There was need for him to be economical. His vacation 
had consumed nearly all he had earned in the laundry, and 
he was so far from his market that weeks must elapse be- 
fore he could hope for the first returns from his hack-work. 
Except at such times as he saw Ruth, or dropped in to see 
his sister Gertude, he lived a recluse, in each day accom- 
plishing at least three days’ labor of ordinary men. He 
slept a scant five hours, and only one with a constitution 
of iron could have held himself down, as Martin did, day 
after day, to nineteen consecutive hours of toil. He never 
- lost a moment. On the looking-glass were lists of defini- 
tions and pronunciations; when shaving, or dressing, or 
combing his hair, he conned these lists over. Similar lists 
were on the wall over the oil-stove, and they were simi- 
larly conned while he was engaged in cooking or in wash- 
ing the dishes. New lists continually displaced the old 
ones. Every strange or partly familiar word encountered 
in his reading was immediately jotted down, and later, 
when a sufficient number had been accumulated, were 
typed and pinned to the wall or looking-glass. He even 
carried them in his pockets, and reviewed them at odd 
moments on the street, or while waiting in butcher shop 
or grocery to be served. 

He went farther in the matter. Reading. the works of 
men who had arrived, he noted every result achieved by 
them, and worked out the tricks by which they had been 
achieved — the tricks of narrative, of exposition, of style, 
the points of view, the contrasts, the epigrams ; and of all 
these he made lists for study. He did not ape. He 
sought principles. He drew up lists of effective and fetch- 
ing mannerisms, till out of many such, culled from many 
writers, he was able to induce the general principle of 
mannerism, and, thus equipped, to cast about for new and 
original ones of his own, and to weigh and measure and 
appraise them properly. In similar manner he collected 
lists of strong phrases, the phrases of living language, 
phrases that bit like acid and scorched like flame, or that 


MARTIN EDEN 197 


glowed and were mellow and luscious in the midst of the 
arid desert of common speech. He sought always for the 
principle that lay behind and beneath. He wanted to 
know how the thing was done; after that he could do it 
for himself. He was not content with the fair face of 
beauty. He dissected beauty in his crowded little bed- 
room laboratory, where cooking smells alternated with the 
outer bedlam of the Silva tribe; and, having dissected 
and learned the anatomy of beauty, he was nearer being 
able to create beauty itself. 

He was so made that he could work only with under- 
standing. He could not work blindly, in the dark, igno- 
rant of what he was producing and trusting to chance and 
the star of his genius that the effect produced should be 
right and fine. He had no patience with chance effects. 
He wanted to know why and how. His was deliberate 
creative genius, and, before he began a story or poem, the 
thing itself was already alive in his brain, with the end in 
sight and the means of realizing that end in his conscious 
possession. Otherwise the effort was doomed to failure. 
On the other hand, he appreciated the chance effects in 
words and phrases that came lightly and easily into his 
brain, and that later stood all tests of beauty and power 
and developed tremendous and incommunicable connota- 
tions. Before such he bowed down and marvelled, know- 
ing that they were beyond the deliberate creation of any 
man. And no matter how much he dissected beauty in 
search of the principles that underlie beauty and make 
beauty possible, he was aware, always, of the innermost 
mystery of beauty to which he did not penetrate and to 
which no man had ever penetrated. He knew full well, 
from his Spencer, that man can never attain ultimate 
knowledge of anything, and that the mystery of beauty 


was no less than that of life — nay, more —that the fibres ~ j 


of beauty and life were intertwisted, and that he himself 
was but a bit of the same nonunderstandable fabric, twisted 
of sunshine and star-dust and wonder. 

In fact, it was when filled with these thoughts that he 
wrote his essay entitled “ Star-dust,” in which he had his 


198 MARTIN EDEN 


fling, not at the principles of criticism, but at the princi- 
pal critics. It was brilliant, deep, philosophical, and 
deliciously touched with laughter. Also it was promptly 
rejected by the magazines as often as it was submitted. 
But having cleared his mind of it, he went serenely on his 
way. It was a habit he developed, of incubating and ma- 
turing his thought upon a subject, and of then rushing 
into the type-writer with it. That it did not see print was 
a matter of small moment with him. The writing of it 
was the culminating act of a long mental process, the 
drawing together of scattered threads of thought and the 
final generalizing upon all the data with which his mind 
was burdened. ‘To write such an article was the conscious 
effort by which he freed his mind and made it ready for 
fresh material and problems. It was in a way akin to that 
common habit of men and women troubled by real or fan- 
cied grievances, who periodically and volubly break their 
long-suffering silence and “ have their say” till the last 
word is said. 


CHAPTER XXIV 


THE weeks passed. Martin ran out of money, and pub- 
lishers’ checks were far away as ever. All his important 
manuscripts had come back and been started out again, 
and his hack-work fared no better. His little kitchen was 
no longer graced with a variety of foods. Caught in the 
pinch with a part sack of rice and a few pounds of dried 
apricots, rice and apricots was his menu three times a day 
for five days hand-running. ‘Then he started to realize on 
his credit. The Portuguese grocer, to whom he had hith- 
erto paid cash, called a halt when Martin’s bill reached the 
magnificent total of three dollars and eighty-five cents. 

“ For you see,”’ said the grocer, “‘ you no catcha da work, 
I losa da mon’.” 

And Martin could reply nothing. There was no way 
of explaining. It was not true business principle to allow 
credit to a strong-bodied young fellow of the working- 
class who was too lazy to work. 

“ You catcha da job, I let you have mora da grub,” the 
grocer assured Martin. “No job, no grub. Thata da./ 
business.” And then, to show that it was purely business 
foresight and not prejudice, “ Hava da drink on da house 
— good friends justa da same.” 

So Martin drank, in his easy way, to show that he was 
good friends with the house, and then went supperless to 
bed. 

The fruit store, where Martin had bought his vegetables, 
was run by an American whose business principles were so 
weak that he let Martin run a bill of five dollars before 
stopping his credit. The baker stopped at two dollars, 
and the butcher at four dollars. Martin added his debts 
and found that he was possessed of a total credit in all the 
world of fourteen dollars and eighty-five cents. He was 

199 


200 MARTIN EDEN 


up with his type-writer rent, but he estimated that he could 
get two months’ credit on that, which would be eight 
dollars. When that occurred, he would have exhausted 
all possible credit. 

The last purchase from the fruit store had been a sack 
of potatoes, and for a week he had potatoes, and nothing 
but potatoes, three times a day. An occasional dinner at 
Ruth’s helped to keep strength in his body, though he 
found it tantalizing enough to refuse further helping when 
his appetite was raging at sight of so much food spread 
before it. Now and again, though afflicted with secret 
shame, he dropped in at his sister’s at meal-time and ate 
as much as he dared—— more than he dared at the Morse 
table. 

Day by day he worked on, and day by day the postman 
delivered to him rejected manuscripts. He had no money 
for stamps, so the manuscripts accumulated in a heap under 
the table. Came a day when for forty hours he had not 
tasted food. He could not hope for a meal at Ruth’s, for 
she was away to San Rafael on a two weeks’ visit; and 
for very shame’s sake he could not go to his sister’s. To 
cap misfortune, the postman, in his afternoon round, 
brought him five returned manuscripts. Then it was that 
Martin wore his overcoat down into Oakland, and came 
back without it, but with five dollars tinkling in his pocket. 
He paid a dollar each on account to the four tradesmen, 
and in his kitchen fried steak and onions, made coffee, and 
stewed a large pot of prunes. And having dined, he sat 
down at his table-desk and completed before midnight an 
essay which he entitled “The Dignity of Usury.” Having 
typed it out, he flung it under the table, for there had been 
nothing left from the five dollars with which to buy 
stamps. 

Later on he pawned his watch, and still later his wheel, 
reducing the amount available for food by putting stamps 
on all his manuscripts and sending them out. He was 
disappointed with his hack-work. Nobody cared to buy. 
He compared it with what he found in the newspapers, 
weeklies, and cheap magazines, and decided that his was 


MARTIN EDEN 201 


better, far better, than the average; yet it would not sell. 
Then he discovered that most of the newspapers printed 
a great deal of what was called “plate” stuff, and he got 
the address of the association that furnished it. His own 
work that he sent in was returned, along with a stereotyped 
slip informing him that the staff supplied all the copy 
that was needed. 

In one of the great juvenile periodicals he noted whole 
columns of incident and anecdote. Here was a chance. 
His paragraphs were returned, and though he tried re- 
peatedly he never succeeded in placing one. Later on, 
when it no longer mattered, he learned that the associate 
editors and sub-editors augmented theirsalaries by supplying 
those paragraphs themselves. ‘The comic weeklies returned 
his jokes and humorous verse, and the light society verse 
he wrote for the large magazines found no abiding-place. 
Then there was the newspaper storiette. He knew that 
he could write better ones than were published. Manag- 
ing to obtain the addresses of two newspaper syndicates, 
he deluged them with storiettes. When he had written 
twenty and failed to place one of them, he ceased. And 
yet, from day to day, he read storiettes in the dailies and 
weeklies, scores and scores of storiettes, not one of which 
would compare with his. In his despondency, he con- 
cluded that he had no judgment whatever, that he was'v 
hypnotized by what he wrote, and that he was a self-deluded 
pretender. 

The inhuman editorial machine ran smoothly as ever. 
He folded the stamps in with his manuscript, dropped it 
into the letter-box, and from three weeks to a month after- 
ward the postman came up the steps and handed him the 
manuscript. Surely there were no live, warm editors at 
the other end. It was all wheels and cogs and oil-cups— 
a clever mechanism operated by automatons. He reached 
stages of despair wherein he doubted if editors existed at 
all. He had never received a sign of the existence of one, 
and from absence of judgment in rejecting all he wrote 
it seemed plausible that editors were myths, manufactured 
and maintained by office boys, typesetters, and pressmen. 


i 
} 
f 


202 MARTIN EDEN 


The hours he spent with Ruth were the only happy ones 
he had, and they were not all happy. He was afflicted 
always with a gnawing restlessness, more tantalizing 
than in the old days before he possessed her love; for 
now that he did possess her love, the possession of her 
was far away as ever. He had asked for two years; 
time was flying, and he was achieving nothing. Again, 
he was always conscious of the fact that she did not 
approve what he was doing. She did not say so directly. 
Yet indirectly she let him understand it as clearly and 
definitely as she could have spoken it. It was not resent- 
ment with her, but disapproval; though less sweet-natured 
women might have resented where she was no more than 
disappointed. Her disappointment lay in that this man 
she had taken to mould, refused to be moulded. To a 
certain extent she had found his clay plastic, then it had 
developed stubbornness, declining to be shaped in the image 
of her father or of Mr. Butler. 

What was great and strong in him, she missed, or, worse 
yet, misunderstood. ‘This man, whose clay was so plastic 
that he could live in any number of pigeonholes of human 
existence, she thought wilful and most obstinate because 
she could not shape him to live in her pigeonhole, which 
was the only one she knew. She could not follow the 
flights of his mind, and when his brain got beyond her, she 
deemed him erratic. Nobody else’s brain ever got beyond 
her. She could always follow her father and mother, her 
brothers and Olney ; wherefore, when she could not follow 
Martin, she believed the fault lay with him. It was the 
old tragedy of insularity trying to serve as mentor to the 
universal. 

“You worship at the shrine of the established,” he told 
her once, in a discussion they had over Praps and Vander- 
water. “I grant that as authorities to quote they are 
most excellent—the two foremost literary critics in the 
United States. Every school teacher in the land looks up 
to Vanderwater as the Dean of American criticism. Yet 
I read his stuff, and it seems to me the perfection of the 
felicitous expression of the inane. Why, he is no more 


MARTIN EDEN 203 


than a ponderous bromide, thanks to Gelett Burgess. And 
Praps is no better. His ‘Hemlock Mosses,’ for instance, 
is beautifully written. Not a comma is out of place; and 
the tone —ah ! —is lofty, so lofty. He is the best-paid 
- critic in the United States. Though, Heaven forbid! he’s 
se critic at all. They do criticism better in Eng- 
land. 

“But the point is, they sound the popular note, and 
they sound it so beautifully and morally and contentedly. 
Their reviews remind me of a British Sunday. They are 
the popular mouthpieces. ‘They back up your professors 
of English, and your professors of English back them up. 
And there isn’t an original idea in any of their skulls. 
They know only the established,—in fact, they are the . 
established. They are weak minded, and the established — 
impresses itself upon them as easily as the name of the brew- 
ery 1s impressed on a beer bottle. And their function is to 
catch all the young fellows attending the university, to 
drive out of their minds any glimmering originality that 
may chance to be there, and to put upon them the stamp 
of the established.” e 

“T think I am nearer the truth,” she replied, “when I 
stand by the established, than you are, raging around like 
an iconoclastic South Sea Islander.” 

“It was the missionary who did the image breaking,” 
he laughed. ‘And unfortunately, all the missionaries 
are off among the heathen, so there are none left at home 
to break those old images, Mr. Vanderwater and Mr. 
Praps.” 

“ And the college professors, as well,” she added. 

He shook his head emphatically. ‘No; the science 
professors should live. They’re really great. But it 
would be a good deed to break the heads of nine-tenths 
of the English professors — little, microscopic-minded 
parrots !” 

Which was rather severe on the professors, but which 
to Ruth was blasphemy. She could not help but measure 
the professors, neat, scholarly, in fitting clothes, speaking 
in well-modulated voices, breathing of culture and refine- 


4 


204 MARTIN EDEN 


ment, with this almost indescribable young fellow whom 
somehow she loved, whose clothes never would fit him, 
whose heavy muscles told of damning toil, who grew ex- 
cited when he talked, substituting abuse for calm statement 
and passionate utterance for cool self-possession. They 
at least earned good salaries and were—yes, she compelled 
. herself to face it— were gentlemen; while he could not 
earn a penny, and he was not as they. 

She did not weigh Martin’s words nor judge his argument 
by them. Her conclusion that his argument was wrong 
was reached — unconsciously, it is true — by a comparison 
of externals. They, the professors, were right in their 


_ | literary judgments because they were successes. Martin’s 


‘ literary judgments were wrong because he could not sell 
his wares. To use his own phrase, they made good, and he 
did not make good. And besides, it did not seem reason- 
able that he should be right—he who had stood, so short 
a time before, in that same living room, blushing and 
awkward, acknowledging his introduction, looking fear- 
fully about him at the bric-a-brac his swinging shoulders 
threatened to break, asking how long since Swinburne 
died, and boastfully announcing that he had read “ Excel- 
sior ’ and the “ Psalm of Life.” 

Unwittingly, Ruth herself proved his point that she wor- 
_ shipped the established. Martin followed the processes 
of her thoughts, but forbore to go farther. He did not 
love her for what she thought of Praps and Vanderwater 
and English professors, and he was coming to realize, with 
increasing conviction, that he possessed brain-areas and 
stretches of knowledge which she could never comprehend 
nor know existed. 

In music she thought him unreasonable, and in the mat- 
ter of opera not only unreasonable but wilfully perverse. 

“ How did you like it?” she asked him one night, on the 
way home from the opera. 

It was a night when he had taken her at the expense of 
a month’s rigid economizing on food. After vainly wait- 
ing for him to speak about it, herself still tremulous and 
stirred by what she had just seen and heard, she had asked 
the question. 


MARTIN EDEN 205 


“IT liked the overture,” was his answer. “It was splen- 
did.” 

“Yes, but the opera itself?” 

“ That was splendid too; that is, the orchestra was, though 
I'd have enjoyed it more if those jumping-jacks had kept 
quiet or gone off the stage.” 

Ruth was aghast. 

“You don’t mean Tetralani or Barillo?” she queried. 

*¢ All of them — the whole kit and crew.” 

“ But they are great artists,” she protested. 

‘They spoiled the music just the same, with their antics 
and unrealities.” 

“But don’t you like Barillo’s voice?” Ruthasked. “He 
is next to Caruso, they say.” 

‘Of course I liked him, and I liked Tetralani even bet- 
ter. Her voice is exquisite — or at least I think so.” 

“ But, but—” Ruth stammered. “I don’t know what 
you mean, then. You admire their voices, yet say they 
spoiled the music.” 

“Precisely that. Pd give anything to hear them in 
concert, and I’d give even a bit more not to hear them 
when the orchestra is playing. I’m afraid I ama hopeless 
realist. Great singers are not great actors. To hear 
Barillo sing a love passage with the voice of an angel, and 
to hear Tetralani reply like another angel, and to hear it 
all accompanied by a perfect orgy of glowing and colorful 
music — is ravishing, most ravishing. Ido not admit it. 
I assert it. But the whole effect is spoiled when I look at 
them — at Tetralani, five feet ten in her stocking feet and 
weighing a hundred and ninety pounds, and at Barillo, a 
scant five feet four, greasy-featured, with the chest of a 
squat, undersized blacksmith, and at the pair of them, at- 
titudinizing, clasping their breasts, flinging their arms in 
the air like demented creatures in an asylum; and when 
I am expected to accept all this as the faithful illusion of 
a love-scene between a slender and beautiful princess and 
a handsome, romantic, young prince—why, I can’t 
accept it, that’s all. It’s rot; it’s absurd; it’s unreal. 
That’s what’s the matter with it. It’s not real. 


206 MARTIN EDEN 


Don’t tell me that anybody in this world ever made love 
that way. Why, if I’d made love to you in such fashion, 
you'd have boxed my ears.” 

“But you misunderstand,’ Ruth protested. “ Every 
form of art has its limitations.” (She was busy recalling 
a lecture she had heard at the university on the conven- 
tions of the arts.) ‘In painting there are only two di- 
mensions to the canvas, yet you accept the illusion of three 
dimensions which the art of a painter enables him to throw 
into the canvas. In writing, again, the author must be 
omnipotent. You accept as perfectly legitimate the au- 
thor’s account of the secret thoughts of the heroine, and 
yet all the time you know that the heroine was alone when 
thinking these thoughts, and that neither the author nor 
any one else was capable of hearing them. And so with 
the stage, with sculpture, with opera, with every art form. 
Certain irreconcilable things must be accepted.” 

‘Yes, I understood that,” Martin answered. ‘ All the 
arts have their conventions.” (Ruth was surprised at his 
use of the word. It was as if he had studied at the 
university himself, instead of being ill-equipped from 
browsing at haphazard through the books in the library.) 
‘¢ But even the conventions must be real. Trees, painted 
on flat cardboard and stuck up on each side of the stage, 
we accept as a forest. It is a real enough convention. 
But, on the other hand, we would not accept a sea scene as 
a forest. We can’t do it. It violates our senses. Nor 
would you, or, rather, should you, accept the ravings and 
writhings and agonized contortions of those two lunatics 
to-night as a convincing portrayal of love.” 

“ But you don’t hold yourself superior to all the judges 
of music?” she protested. 

“No, no, not for a moment. I merely maintain my 
right as an individual. I have just been telling you 
what I think, in order to explain why the elephantine 
gambols of Madame Tetralani spoil the orchestra for me. 
_ The world’s judges of music may all be right. But I am 
\,I, and I won’t subordinate my taste to the unanimous 

judgment of mankind. If I don’t like a thing, I don’t 


MARTIN EDEN 207 


like it, that’s all; and there is no reason under the sun 
why I should ape a liking for it just because the majority 
of my fellow-creatures lke it, or make believe they like 
it. I can’t follow the fashions in the things I like or 
dislike.” 

‘But music, you know, is a matter of training,” Ruth 
argued; “and opera is even more a matter of training. 
May it not be —” 

“ That I am not trained in opera ?” he dashed in. 

She nodded. 

“The very thing,” he agreed. “And I consider I am 
fortunate in not having been caught when I was young. 
If I had, I could have wept sentimental tears to-night, 
and the clownish antics of that precious pair would have 
but enhanced the beauty of their voices and the beauty 
of the accompanying orchestra. You are right. It’s 
mostly a matter of training. And I am too old, now. I 
must have the real or nothing. An illusion that won’t 
convince is a palpable le, and that’s what grand opera is 
to me when little Barillo throws a fit, clutches mighty 
Tetralani in his arms (also in a fit), and tells her how 
passionately he adores her.” 

Again Ruth measured his thoughts by comparison of 
externals and in accordance with her belief in the estab- | 
lished. Who was he that he should be right and all the” 
cultured world wrong? His words and thoughts made 
no impression upon her. She was too firmly intrenched 
in the established to have any sympathy with revolution- 
ary ideas. She had always been used to music, and she 
had enjoyed opera ever since she was a child, and all her 
world had enjoyed it, too. Then by what right did 
Martin Eden emerge, as he had so recently emerged, 
from his rag-time and working-class songs, and pass judg- 
ment on the world’s music ? She was vexed with him, and 
as she walked beside him she had a vague feeling of out- 
rage. At the best, in her most charitable frame of mind, 
she considered the statement of his views to be a caprice, 
an erratic and uncalled-for prank. But when he took 
her in his arms at the door and kissed her good night in 


208 - MARTIN EDEN 


tender lover-fashion, she forgot everything in the outrush 
of her own love to him. And later, on a sleepless pillow, 
she puzzled, as she had often puzzled of late, as to how it 
was that she loved so strange a man, and loved him despite 
the disapproval of her people. 

And next day Martin Eden cast hack-work aside, and 
at white heat hammered out an essay to which he gave 
the title, “*‘ The Philosophy of Illusion.” <A stamp:started 
it on its travels, but it was destined to receive many 
stamps and to be started on many travels in the months 
that followed. 


CHAPTER XXV 


MARIA SILVA was poor, and all the ways of poverty 
were clear to her. Poverty, to Ruth, was a word signi- 
fying a not-nice condition of existence. That was her 
total knowledge on the subject. She knew Martin was 
poor, and his condition she associated in her mind with 


the boyhood of Abraham Lincoln, of Mr. Butler, and of 


other men who had become successes. Also, while aware 
that poverty was anything but delectable, she had a com- 
fortable middle-class feeling that poverty was salutary, 
that it was a sharp spur that urged on to success all men 
who were not degraded and hopeless drudges. So that ” 
her knowledge that Martin was so poor that he had 
pawned his watch and overceat did not disturb her. She 
even considered it the hopeful side of the situation, be- 
leving that sooner or later it would arouse him and com- 
pel him to abandon his writing. 

Ruth never read hunger in Martin’s face, which had 
grown lean and had enlarged the slight hollows in the 
cheeks. In fact, she marked the change in his face with 
satisfaction. It seemed to refine him, to remove from him 
much of the dross of flesh and the too animal-like vigor 
that lured her while she detested it. Sometimes, when 
with her, she noted an unusual brightness in his eyes, and 
she admired it, for it made him appear more the poet 
and the scholar — the things he would have liked to be 
and which she would have liked him to be. But Maria 
Silva read a different tale in the hollow cheeks and the 
burning eyes, and she noted the changes in them from 
day to day, by them following the ebb and flow of his 
fortunes. She saw him leave the house with his overcoat 
and return without it, though the day was chill and raw, 
and promptly she saw his cheeks fill out slightly and the 

P 209 


210 MARTIN EDEN 


fire of hunger leave his eyes. In the same way she had 
seen his wheel and watch go, and after each event she had 
seen his vigor bloom again. 

Likewise she watched his toils, and knew the measure 
of the midnight oil he burned. Work! She knew that 
he outdid her, though his work was of a different order. 
And she was surprised to behold that the less food he had, 
the harder he worked. On occasion, in a casual sort of 
way, when she thought hunger pinched hardest, she would 
send him ina loaf of new baking, awkwardly covering the 
act with banter to the effect that it was better than he 
could bake. And again, she would send one of her tod- 
dlers in to him with a great pitcher of hot soup, debating 
inwardly the while whether she was justified in taking it 
from the mouths of her own flesh and blood. Nor was 
Martin ungrateful, knowing as he did the lives of the poor, 
and that if ever in the world there was charity, this was it. 

On a day when she had filled her brood with what was 
left in the house, Maria invested her last fifteen cents in a 
gallon of cheap wine. Martin, coming into her kitchen to 
fetch water, was invited tosit down and drink. Hedrank 
her very good health, and in return shedrank his. Then 
she drank to prosperity in his undertakings, and he drank 
to the hope that James Grant would show up and pay her 
for his washing. James Grant was a journeymen carpen- 
ter who did not always pay his bills and who owed Maria 
three dollars. 

Both Maria and Martin drank the sour new wine on 
empty stomachs, and it went swiftly to their heads. 
Utterly differentiated creatures that they were, they were 
lonely in their misery, and though the misery was tacitly 
ignored, it was the bond that drew them together. Maria 
was amazed tolearn that he had been in the Azores, where she 

_ had lived until she was eleven. She was doubly amazed 
that he had been in the Hawaiian Islands, whither she had 
migrated from the Azores with her people. But her amaze- 
ment passed all bounds when he told her he had been on 
Maui, the particular island whereon she had attained 

-womanhood and married. Kahului, where she had first 


MARTIN EDEN 211 


met her husband,—he, Martin, had been there twice! 
Yes, she remembered the sugar steamers, and he had been 
on them — well, well, it wasasmall world. And Wailuku! 
That place, too! Did he know the head-luna of the 
plantation? Yes, and had had a couple of drinks with him. 

And so they reminiscenced and drowned their hunger 
in the raw, sour wine. To Martin the future did not 
seem so dim. Success trembled just beforehim. He was 
on the verge of clasping it. ‘Then he studied the deep- 
lined face of the toil-worn woman before him, remem- 
bered her soups and loaves of new baking, and felt 
spring up in him the warmest gratitude and philanthropy. 

“‘ Maria,” he exclaimed suddenly. “ What would you 
like to have?” 

She looked at him, bepuzzled. 

“ What would you like to have now, right now, if you 
could get it?” 

“Shoe alla da roun’ for da childs — seven pairs da 
shoe.” 

‘¢ You shall have them,” he announced, while she nodded 
her head gravely. ‘ But I mean a big wish, something 
big that you want.” 

Her eyes sparkled good-naturedly. He was choosing 
to make fun with her, Maria, with whom few made fun 
these days. 

“Think hard,” he cautioned, just as she was opening 
her mouth to speak. 

“ Allaright,” she answered. “I thinkadahard. [ lika 
da house, dis house —all mine, no paya da rent, seven dol- 
lar da month.” 

“You shall have it,” he granted, “‘and in a short time. 
Now wish the great wish. Make believe I am God, and 
I say to you anything you want youcan have. Then you 
wish that thing, and I listen.” 

Maria considered solemnly for a space. 

“ You no ’fraid ?” she asked warningly. 

“No, no,” he laughed, “ I’m not afraid. Go ahead.” 

‘“‘ Most verra big,” she warned again. 

“Allright. Fire away.” 


212 . MARTIN EDEN 


“ Well, den—’” She drew a big breath like a child, 
as she voiced to the uttermost all she cared to demand of 
life. ‘*I lika da have one milka ranch —good milka 
ranch. Plenty cow, plenty land, plenty grass. I lika da 
have near San Le-an; my sister liva dere. I sella da 
milk in Oakland. I maka da plenteemon. Joean’ Nick 
no runna da cow. Dey go-atoschool. Bimeby maka da 
good engineer, worka da railroad. Yes, I lika da milka 
ranch.” 

She paused and regarded Martin with twinkling eyes. 

“ You shall have it,” he answered promptly. 

She nodded her head and touched her lips courteously 
to the wine-glass and to the giver of the gift she knew 
would never be given. His heart was right, and inher own 
heart she appreciated his intention as much as if the gift 
had gone with it. 

‘No, Maria,” he went on; * Nick and Joe won’t have to 
peddle milk, and all the kids can go to school and wear 
shoes the whole year round. It will be a first-class milk 
ranch — everything complete. ‘There will be a house to 
live in anda stable forthe horses, and cow-barns, of course. 
There will be chickens, pigs, vegetables, fruit trees, and 
everything like that; and there will be enough cows to 
pay for a hired man or two. Then you won’t have any- 
thing to do but take care of the children. For that mat- 
ter, if you find a good man, you can marry and take it 
easy while he runs the ranch.” 

And from such largess, dispensed from his future, 
Martin turned and took his one good suit of clothes to the 
pawnshop. His plight was desperate for him to do this, 
for it cut him off from Ruth. He had no second-best suit 
_ that was presentable, and though he could go to the 
butcher and the baker, and even on occasion to his sister’s, 
it was beyond all daring to dream of entering the Morse 
home so disreputably apparelled. 

He toiled on, miserable and well-nigh hopeless. It 
began to appear to him that the second battle was lost and 
that he would have to goto work. In doing this he would 
satisfy everybody— the grocer, his sister, Ruth, and even 


MARTIN EDEN 213 


Maria, to whom he owed a month’s room rent. He was 
two months behind with his type-writer, and the agency 
was clamoring for payment or for the return of the 
machine. In desperation, all but ready to surrender, to 
make a truce with fate until he could get a fresh start, he 
took the civil service examinations for the Railway Mail. 
To his surprise, he passed first. The job was assured, 
though when the call would come to enter upon his duties 
nobody knew. 

It was at this time, at the lowest ebb, that the smooth- 
running editorial machine broke down. A cog must have 
slipped or an oil-cup run dry, for the postman brought 
him one morning a short, thin envelope. Martin glanced 
at the upper left-hand corner and read the name and 
address of the Transcontinental Monthly. His heart gave 
a great leap, and he suddenly felt faint, the sinking 
feeling accompanied by a strange trembling of the knees. 
He staggered into his room and sat down on the bed, the 
envelope still unopened, and in that moment came under- 
standing to him how people suddenly fall dead upon 
receipt of extraordinarily good news. 

Of course this was good news. There was no manu- 
script in that thin envelope, therefore it was an acceptance. 
He knew the story in the hands of the Transcontt- 
nental. It was “The Ring of Bells,” one of his horror 
stories, and it was an even five thousand words. And, 
since first-class magazines always paid, on acceptance, 
there was a check inside. Two cents a word — twenty 
dollars a thousand ; the check must be a hundred dollars. 
One hundred dollars! As he tore the envelope open, 
every item of all his debts surged in his brain — $3.85 
to the grocer; butcher, $4.00 flat; baker, $2.00; fruit store, 
$5.00; total, $14.85. Then there was room rent, $2.50; 
another month in advance, $2.50; two months’ type-writer, 
$8.00 ; a month in advance, $4.00; total, $31.85. And 
finally to be added, his pledges, plus interest, with the 
pawnbroker— watch, $5.50; overcoat, $5.50; wheel, $7.75; 
suit of clothes, $5.50 (60 % interest, but what did it 
matter ?) — grand total, $56.10. He saw, as if visible in 


214 MARTIN EDEN 


the air before him, in illuminated figures, the whole sum, 
and the subtraction that followed and that gave a re- 
mainder of $43.90. When he had squared every debt, 
redeemed every pledge, he would still have jingling in 
his pockets a princely $48.90. And on top of that he 
would have a month’s rent paid in advance on the type- 
writer and on the room. 

By this time he had drawn the single sheet of type- 
written letter out and spread it open. There was no 
check. He peered into the envelope, held it to the light, 
but could not trust his eyes, and in trembling haste tore 
the envelope apart. There was no check. He read 
the letter, skimming it line by line, dashing through 
the editor’s praise of his story to the meat of the letter, the 
statement why the check had not been sent. He found 
no such statement, but he did find that which made 
him suddenly wilt. The letter slid from his hand. His 
eyes went lack-lustre, and he lay back on the pillow, 
pulling the blanket about him and up to his chin. 

Five dollars for “The Ring of Bells” —five dollars 
for five thousand words! Instead of two cents a word, 
ten words for a cent! And the editor had praised it, too. 
And he would receive the check when the story was pub- 
lished. ‘Then it was all poppycock, two cents a word for 
minimum rate and payment upon acceptance. It was a 
lie, and it had led him astray. He would never have 
attempted to write had he known that. He would have 
gone to work — to work for Ruth. He went back to the 
day he first attempted to write, and was appalled at the 
enormous waste of time —and all for ten words for a 
cent. And the other high rewards of writers, that he 
had read about, must be lies, too. His second-hand ideas 
of authorship were wrong, for here was the proof of it. 

‘The Transcontinental sold for twenty-five cents, and 
its dignified and artistic cover proclaimed it as among 
the first-class magazines. It was a staid, respectable 
magazine, and it had been published continuously since 
long before he was born. Why, on the outside cover were 
printed every month the words of one of the world’s great 


MARTIN EDEN , 215 


writers, words proclaiming the inspired mission of the 
Transcontinental by a star of literature whose first 
coruscations had appeared inside those self-same covers. 
And the high and lofty, heaven-inspired Transcontt- 
nental paid five dollars for five thousand words! The 
great writer had recently died in a foreign land — in dire 
poverty, Martin remembered, which was not to be 
wondered at, considering the magnificent pay authors 
receive. 

Well, he had taken the bait, the newspaper lies about 
writers and their pay, and he had wasted two years over 
it. But he would disgorge the bait now. Not another 
line would he ever write. He would do what Ruth 
wanted him to do, what everybody wanted him to do — 
getajob. The thought of going to work reminded him 
of Joe — Joe, tramping through the land of nothing-to-do. 
Martin heaved a great sigh of envy. ‘The reaction of 
nineteen hours a day for many days was strong upon him. 
But then, Joe was not in love, had none of the responsi- 
bilities of love, and he could afford to loaf through the 
land of nothing-to-do. He, Martin, had something to 
work for, and go to work he would. He would start out 
early next morning to hunt a job. And he would let 
Ruth know, too, that he had mended his ways and was 
willing to go into her father’s office. 

Five dollars for five thousand words, ten words for a 
cent, the market price for art. The disappointment of it, 
the lie of it, the infamy of it, were uppermost in his 
thoughts; and under his closed eyelids, in fiery figures, 
burned the “$3.85” he owed the grocer. He shivered, 
and was aware of an aching in his bones. The small of 
his back ached especially. His head ached, the top of it 
ached, the back of it ached, the brains inside of it ached 
and seemed to be swelling, while the ache over his brows 
was intolerable. And beneath the brows, planted under 
his lids, was the merciless “$3.85.” He opened his eyes 
to escape it, but the white light of the room seemed to 
sear the balls and forced him to close his eyes, when the 
“© $3.85” confronted him again. 


216 MARTIN EDEN 


Five dollars for five thousand words, ten words for a 
cent — that particular thought took up its residence in 
his brain, and he could no more escape it than he could 
the “$3.85” under his eyelids. A change seemed to 
come over the latter, and he watched curiously, till “ $2.00” 
burned in its stead. Ah, he thought, that was the baker. 
The next sum that appeared was “$2.50.” It puzzled 
him, and he pondered it as if life and death hung on the 
solution. He owed somebody two dollars and a half, that 
was certain, but who was it? To find it was the task set 
him by an imperious and malignant universe, and he 
wandered through the endless corridors of his mind, open- 
ing all manner of lumber rooms and chambers stored with 
odds and ends of memories and knowledge as he vainly 
sought the answer. After several centuries it came to 
him, easily, without effort, that it was Maria. With a 
great relief he turned his soul to the screen of torment 
under his lids. He had solved the problem; now he 
could rest. But no, the “$2.50” faded away, and in its 
place burned “$8.00.” Who was that? He must go the 
dreary round of his mind again and find out. 

How long he was gone on this quest he did not know, 
but after what seemed an enormous lapse of time, he was 
called back to himself by a knock at the door, and by 
Maria’s asking if he was sick. He replied in a muffled 
voice he did not recognize, saying that he was merely 
taking a nap. He was surprised when he noted the dark- 
ness of night in the room. He had received the letter 
at two in the afternoon, and he realized that he was sick. 

Then the “$8.00” began to smoulder under his lids 
again, and he returned himself to servitude. But he 
grew cunning. ‘There was no need for him to wander 
through his mind. He had been a fool. He pulled a 
lever and made his mind revolve about him, a monstrous 


\.wheel of fortune, a merry-go-round of memory, a revolv- 


' ing sphere of wisdom. Faster and faster it revolved, 
until its vortex sucked him in and he was flung whirling 
through black chaos. 

Quite naturally he found himself at a mangle, feeding 


MARTIN EDEN 217 


starched cuffs. But as he fed he noticed figures printed 
on the cuffs. It was a new way of marking linen, he 
thought, until, looking closer, he saw “ $3.85” on one of 
the cuffs. Then it came to him that it was the grocer’s 
bill, and that these were his bills flying around on the 
drum of the mangle. A crafty idea came to him. He 
would throw the bills on the floor and so escape paying 
them. No sooner thought than done, and he crumpled 
the cuffs spitefully as he flung them upon an unusually 
dirty floor. Ever the heap grew, and though each bill 
was duplicated a thousand times, he found only one for 
two dollars and a half, which was what he owed Maria. 
That meant that Maria would not press for payment, and 
he resolved generously that it would be the only one he 
would pay; so he began searching through the cast-out 
heap for hers. He sought it desperately, for ages, and 
was still searching when the manager of the hotel entered, 
the fat Dutchman. His face blazed with wrath, and he 
shouted in stentorian tones that echoed down the uni- 
verse, “I shall deduct the cost of those cuffs from your 
wages!” The pile of cuffs grew into a mountain, and 
Martin knew that he was doomed to toil for a thousand 
years to pay for them. Well, there was nothing left to 
do but kill the manager and burn down the laundry. 
But the big Dutchman frustrated him, seizing him by the 
nape of the neck and dancing him up and down. He 
danced him over the ironing tables, the stove, and the 
mangles, and out into the wash-room and over the wringer 
and washer. Martin was danced until his teeth rattled 
and his head ached, and he marvelled that the Dutchman 
was so strong. 

And then he found himself before the mangle, this time 
receiving the cuffs an editor of a magazine was feeding 
from the other side. Each cuff was a check, and Martin 
went over them anxiously, in a fever of expectation, but 
they were all blanks. He stood there and received the 
blanks for a million years or so, never letting one go by 
for fear it might be filled out. At last he found it. With 
trembling fingers he held it to the light. It was for five 


218 MARTIN EDEN 


dollars. ‘Ha! Ha!” laughed the editor across the man- 
gle. ‘“ Well, then, I shall kill you,’ Martin said. He 
went out into the wash-room to get the axe, and found 
Joe starching manuscripts. He tried to make him desist, 
then swung the axe for him. But the weapon remained 
poised in mid-air, for Martin found himself back in the 
ironing room in the midst of a snow-storm. No, it was 
not snow that was falling, but checks of large denomina- 
tion, the smallest not less than a thousand dollars. He 
began to collect them and sort them out, in packages of 
a hundred, tying each package securely with twine. 

He looked up from his task and saw Joe standing 
before him juggling flat-irons, starched shirts, and manu- 
scripts. Now and again he reached out and added a bun- 
dle of checks to the flying miscellany that soared through 
the roof and out of sight in a tremendous circle. Martin 
struck at him, but he seized the axe and added it to the 
flying circle. Then he plucked Martin and added him. 
Martin went up through the roof, clutching at manu- 
scripts, so that by the time he came down he had a large 
armful. But no sooner down than up again, and a second 
and a third time and countless times he flew around the 
circle. From far off he could hear a childish treble sing- 
ing: “ Waltz me around again, Willie, around, around, 
around.”’ 

He recovered the axe in the midst of the Milky Way of 
checks, starched shirts, and manuscripts, and prepared, 
when he came down, to kill Joe. But he did not come 
down. Instead, at two in the morning, Maria, having 
heard his groans through the thin partition, came into his 
room, to put hot flat-irons against his body and damp 
cloths upon his aching eyes. 


CHAPTER XXVI 


MARTIN EDEN did not go out to hunt for a job in the 
morning. It was late afternoon before he came out of his 
delirium and gazed with aching eyes about the room. 
Mary, one of the tribe of Silva, eight years old, keeping 
watch, raised a screech at sight of his returning conscious- 
ness. Maria hurried into the room from the kitchen. 
She put her work-calloused hand upon his hot forehead 
and felt his pulse. 

“You lika da eat?” she asked. 

He shook his head. Eating was farthest from his desire, 
and he wondered that he should ever have been hungry in 
his life. 

“Tm sick, Maria,” he said weakly. “ Whatisit? Do 
you know ?” 7 

“Grip,” she answered. ‘“ Two or three days youalla da 
right. Better you no eat now. Bimeby plenty can eat, 
to-morrow can eat maybe.” 

Martin was not used to sickness, and when Maria and 
her little girl left him, he essayed to get up and dress. By 
a supreme exertion of will, with reeling brain and eyes 
that ached so that he could not keep them open, he man- 
aged to get out of bed, only to be left stranded by his 
senses upon the table. Half an hour later he managed to re- 
gain the bed, where he was content to le with closed eyes 
and analyze his various pains and weaknesses. Maria 
came in several times to change the cold cloths on his 
forehead. Otherwise she left him in peace, too wise to 
vex him with chatter. This moved him to gratitude, and 
he murmured to himself, “Maria, you getta da milka 
ranch, all righta, all right.” 

Then he remembered his long-buried past of yesterday. 
It seemed a life-time since he had received that letter from 

219 


220 MARTIN EDEN 


the Transcontinental, a life-time since it was all over and 
done with and a new page turned. He had shot his bolt, 
and shot it hard, and now he was down on his back. If 
he hadn’t starved himself, he wouldn’t have been caught 
by La Grippe. He had been run down, and he had not 
had the strength to throw off the germ of disease which 
had invaded his system. ‘This was what resulted. 

“What does it profit a man to write a whole library and 
lose his own life?” he demanded aloud. “ This is no 
place forme. No more literature in mine. Me for the 
counting-house and ledger, the monthly salary, and the 
little home with Ruth.” 

Two days later, having eaten an egg and two slices of 
toast and drunk a cup of tea, he asked for his mail, but 
found his eyes still hurt too much to permit him to read. 

‘You read for me, Maria,” he said. “Never mind the 
big, long letters. Throw them under the table. Read 
me the small letters.” 

“No can,” was the answer. ‘“ Teresa, she go to school, 
‘ shecan.' 

So Teresa Silva, aged nine, opened his letters and read 
them to him. He listened absently to a long dun from 
the type-writer people, his mind busy with ways and 
means of finding a job. Suddenly he was shocked back to 
himself. 

“«*¢ We offer you forty dollars for all serial rights in your 
story,” ‘Teresa slowly spelled out, “ ‘ provided you allow 
us to make the alterations suggested.’ ” 

‘What magazine is that?” Martin shouted. “Here, 
give it to me!” 

He could see to read, now, and he was unaware of the 
pain of the action. It wasthe White Mouse that was offer- 
ing him forty dollars, and the story was “ The Whirlpool,” 
another of his early horror stories. He read the letter 
through again and again. The editor told him plainly 
that he had not handled the idea properly, but that it was 
the idea they were buying because it was original. If 
they could cut the story down one-third, they would take 
it and send him forty dollars on receipt of his answer. 


MARTIN EDEN  - 221 


He called for pen and ink, and told the editor he could 
cut the story down three-thirds if he wanted to, and to 
send the forty dollars right along. 

The letter despatched to the letter-box by Teresa, Mar- 
tin lay back and thought. It wasn’t a le, after all. The 
White Mouse paid on acceptance. ‘There were three 
thousand words in * The Whirlpool.” Cut down a third, 
there would be two thousand. At forty dollars that would 
be two cents a word. Pay on acceptance and two cents a 
word — the newspapers had told the truth. And he had 
thought the White Mouse a third-rater! It was evi- 
dent that he did not know the magazines. He had 
deemed the Transcontinental a first-rater, and it paid a 
cent for ten words. He had classed the White Mouse 
as of no account, and it paid twenty times as much as 
the Transcontinental and also had paid on acceptance. 

Well, there was one thing certain: when he got well, 
he would not go out looking for a job. ‘There were more 
stories in his head as good as “The Whirlpool,” and at 
forty dollars apiece he could earn far more than in any 
job or position. Just when he thought the battle lost, it 
was won. He had proved for his career. ‘The way was 
clear. Beginning with the White Mouse he would 
add magazine after magazine to his growing list of 
patrons. Hack-work could be put aside. For that mat- 
ter, it had been wasted time, for it had not brought him 
a dollar. He would devote himself to work, good work, 
and he would pour out the best that was in him. He 
wished Ruth was there to share in his joy, and when he 
went over the letters left lying on his bed, he found one 
from her. It was sweetly reproachful, wondering what 
had kept him away for so dreadful a length of time. He 
reread the letter adoringly, dwelling over her hand- 
writing, loving each stroke of her pen, and in the end 
kissing her signature. 

And when he answered, he told her recklessly that he 
had not been to see her because his best clothes were in 
pawn. He told her that he had been sick, but was once 
more nearly well, and that inside ten days or two weeks 


222 MARTIN EDEN 


(as soon as a letter could travel to New York City and 
return) he would redeem his clothes and be with her. 

But Ruth did not care to wait ten days or two weeks. 
Besides, her lover was sick. ‘The next afternoon, accom- 
panied by Arthur, she arrived in the Morse carriage, to 
the unqualified delight of the Silva tribe and of all the 
urchins on the street, and to the consternation of Maria. 
She boxed the ears of the Silvas who crowded about the 
visitors on the tiny front porch, and in more than usual 
atrocious English tried to apologize for her appearance. 
Sleeves rolled up from soap-flecked arms and a wet 
gunny-sack around her waist told of the task at which 
she had been caught. So flustered was she by two such 
grand young people asking for her lodger, that she forgot 
to invite them to sit down in the little parlor. To enter 
Martin’s room, they passed through the kitchen, warm 
and moist and steamy from the big washing in progress. 
Maria, in her excitement, jammed the bedroom and bed- 
room-closet doors together, and for five minutes, through 
the partly open door, clouds of steam, smelling of soap- 
suds and dirt, poured into the sick chamber. 

Ruth succeeded in veering right and left and right 
again, and in running the narrow passage between table 
and bed to Martin’s side; but Arthur veered too wide 
and fetched up with clatter and bang of pots and pans 
in the corner where Martin did his cooking. Arthur did 
not linger long. Ruth occupied the only chair, and hav- 
ing done his duty, he went outside and stood by the gate, 
the centre of seven marvelling Silvas, who watched him as 
they would have watched a curiosity in a side-show. All 
about the carriage were gathered the children from a 
dozen blocks, waiting and eager for some tragic and 
terrible denouement. Carriages were seen on their street 
only for weddings and funerals. Here was neither mar- 
riage nor death; therefore, it was something transcending 
experience and well worth waiting for. 

Martin had been wild to see Ruth. His was essentially 
a love-nature, and he possessed more than the average 
man’s need for sympathy. He was starving for sympathy, 


MARTIN EDEN . 223 


which, with him, meant intelligent understanding; and 
he had yet to learn that Ruth’s sympathy was largely 
sentimental and tactful, and that it proceeded from gentle- 
ness of nature rather than from understanding of the 
objects of her sympathy. So it was while Martin held her 
hand and gladly talked, that her love for him prompted 
her to press his hand in return, and that her eyes were 
moist and luminous at sight of his helplessness and of 
the marks suffering had stamped upon his face. 

But while he told her of his two acceptances, of his 
despair when he received the one from the Transcon- 
tinental, and of the corresponding delight with which he 
received the one from the White Mouse, she did not 
follow him. She heard the words he uttered and under- 
stood their literal import, but she was not with him in his 
despair and his delight. She could not get out of herself. 
She was not interested in selling stories to magazines. 
What was important to her was matrimony. She was 
not aware of it, however, any more than she was aware 
that her desire that Martin take a position was the in- 
stinctive and preparative impulse of motherhood. She 
would have blushed had she been told as much in plain, 
set terms, and next, she might have grown indignant and 
asserted that her sole interest lay in the man she loved 
and her desire for him to make the best of himself. So, 
while Martin poured out his heart to her, elated with the 
first success his chosen work in the world had received, 
she paid heed to his bare words only, gazing now and 
again about the room, shocked by what she saw. 

For the first time Ruth gazed upon the sordid face of 
poverty. Starving lovers had always seemed romantic 
to her, but she had had no idea how starving lovers lived. 
She had never dreamed it could be like this. Ever her 
gaze shifted from the room to him and back again. The 
steamy smell of dirty clothes, which had entered with 
her from the kitchen, was sickening. Martin must be 
soaked with it, Ruth concluded, if that awful woman 
washed frequently. Such was the contagiousness of deg- 
radation. When she looked at Martin, she seemed to 


224. MARTIN EDEN 


see the smirch left upon him by his surroundings. She 
had never seen him unshaven, and the three days’ growth 
of beard on his face was repulsive to her. Not alone 
did it give him the same dark and murky aspect of the 
Silva house, inside and out, but it seemed to emphasize 
that animal-like strength of his which she detested. And 
here he was, being confirmed in his madness by the two 
acceptances he took such pride in telling her about. A 
little longer and he would have surrendered and gone 
to work. Now he would continue on in this horrible 
house, writing and starving for a few more months. 

“¢ What is that smell?” she asked suddenly. 

‘Some of Maria’s washing smells, I imagine,” was the 
answer. ‘Iam growing quite accustomed to them.” 

“No, no; not that. It is something else. A stale, 
sickish smell.” 

Martin sampled the air before replying. 

“IT can’t smell anything else, except stale tobacco smoke,” 
he announced. 

“ That’s it. It is terrible. Why do you smoke so 
much, Martin?” 

“T don’t know, except that I smoke more than usual 
when I am lonely. And then, too, it’s such a long-stand- 
ing habit. I learned when I was only a youngster.” 

“Tt is not a nice habit, you know,” she reproved. “It 
smells to heaven.”’ 

“That’s the fault of the tobacco. I can afford only the 
cheapest. But wait until I get that forty-dollar check. 
I'll use a brand that is not offensive even to the angels. 
But that wasn’t so bad, was it, two acceptances in three 
days? That forty-five dollars will pay about all my 
debts.” 

“For two years’ work?” she queried. 

“ No, for less than a week’s work. Please pass me that 
book over on the far corner of the table, the account 
book with the gray cover.” He opened it and began 
turning over the pages rapidly. ‘“ Yes, I was right. 
Four days for ‘The Ring of Bells,’ two days for ‘The 
Whirlpool.’ That’s forty-five dollars for a week’s work, 


MARTIN EDEN - 225 


one hundred and eighty dollars a month. That beats 
any salary I can command. And, besides, I’m just begin- 
ning. A thousand dollars a month is not too much to 
buy for you all I want you to have. A salary of five 
hundred a month would be too small. That forty-five 
dollars is just a starter. Wait till I get my stride. 
Then watch my smoke.” 

Ruth misunderstood his slang, and reverted to ciga- 
rettes. 

‘You smoke more than enough as it is, and the brand 
of tobacco will make no difference. It is the smoking 
itself that is not nice, no matter what the brand may be. 
You are a chimney, a living volcano, a perambulating 
smoke-stack, and you are a perfect disgrace, Martin dear, 
you know you are.” 

She leaned toward him, entreaty in her eyes, and as he 
looked at her delicate face and into her pure, limpid eyes, 
as of old he was struck with his own unworthiness. 

‘¢T wish you wouldn’t smoke any more,” she whispered. 
“‘ Please, for —my sake.” ‘ 

“ All right, I won’t,” he cried. “Tl do anything you 
ask, dear love, anything; you know that.” 

A great temptation assailed her. In an insistent way 
she had caught glimpses of the large, easy-going side of 
his nature, and she felt sure, if she asked him to cease 
attempting to write, that he would grant her wish. In 
the swift instant that elapsed, the words trembled on her 
lips. But she did not utter them. She was not quite 
brave enough; she did not quite dare. Instead, she leaned 
toward him to meet him, and in his arms murmured : — 

“You know, it is really not for my sake, Martin, but 
for your own. I am sure smoking hurts you; and _be- 
sides, it is not good to be a slave to anything, to a drug 
least of all.” 

“ T shall always be your slave,” he smiled. 

“In which case, I shall begin issuing my commands.” 

She looked at him mischievously, though deep down she 
was already regretting that she had not preferred her 
largest request. 

Q 


226 MARTIN EDEN 


“I live but to obey, your majesty.” 

“Well, then, my first commandment is, Thou shalt not 
omit to shave every day. Look how you have scratched 
my cheek.” 

And so it ended in caresses and love-laughter. But 
she had made one point, and she could not expect to make 
more than one at a time. She felt a woman’s pride in that 
she had made him stop smoking. Another time she would 
persuade him to take a position, for had he not said he 
would do anything she asked? 

She left his side to explore the room, examining the 
clothes-lines of notes overhead, learning the mystery of 
the tackle used for suspending his wheel under the ceiling, 
and being saddened by the heap of manuscripts under the 
table which represented to her just so much wasted time. 
The oil-stove won her admiration, but on investigating the 
food shelves she found them empty. 

“Why, you haven’t anything to eat, you poor dear,” she 
said with tender compassion. ‘ You must be starving.” 

“JT store my food in Maria’s safe and in her pantry,”’ 
he lied. “It keeps better there. No danger of my starv- 
ing. Look at that.” 

She had come back to his side, and she saw him double 
his arm at the elbow, the biceps crawling under his shirt- 
sleeve and swelling into a knot of muscle, heavy and hard. 
The sight repelled her. Sentimentally, she disliked it. 
But her pulse, her blood, every fibre of her, loved it and 
yearned for it, and, in the old, inexplicable way, she leaned 
toward him, not away from him. And in the moment 
that followed, when he crushed her in his arms, the brain 
of her, concerned with the superficial aspects of life, 
was in revolt; while the heart of her, the woman of 
her, concerned with life itself, exulted triumphantly. 
It was in moments like this that she felt to the utter- 
most the greatness of her love for Martin, for it was 
almost a swoon of delight to her to feel his strong 
arms about her, holding her tightly, hurting her with 
the grip of their fervor. At such moments she found 
justification for her treason to her standards, for her viola- 


MARTIN EDEN - 9297 


tion of her own high ideals, and, most of all, for her tacit 
disobedience to her mother and father. hey did not 
want her to marry this man. It shocked them that she 
should love him. It shocked her, too, sometimes, when 
she was apart from him, a cool and reasoning creature. 
With him, she loved him —in truth, at times a vexed and 
worried love; but love it was, a love that was stronger 
than she. 

“This La Grippe is nothing,” he was saying. “It hurts 
a bit, and gives one a nasty headache, but it doesn’t com- 
pare with break-bone fever.” 

“ Have you had that, too?” she queried absently, intent 
on the heaven-sent justification she was finding in his arms. 

And so, with absent queries, she led him on, till sud- 
denly his words startled her. 

He had had the fever in a secret colony of thirty lepers 
on one of the Hawaiian Islands. 

“ But why did you go there?” she demanded. 

Such royal carelessness of body seemed criminal. 

‘“ Because I didn’t know,” he answered. “I never 
dreamed of lepers. When I deserted the schooner and 
landed on the beach, I headed inland for some place of 
hiding. For three days I lived off guavas, ohia-apples, 
and bananas, all of which grew wild in the jungle. On 
the fourth day I found the trail—a mere foot-trail. It 
led inland, and it led up. It was the way I wanted to go, 
and it showed signs of recent travel. At one place it ran 
along the crest of a ridge that was no more than.a knife- 
edge. The trail wasn’t three feet wide on the crest, and 
on either side the ridge fell away in precipices hundreds of 
feet deep. One man, with plenty of ammunition, could 
have held it against a hundred thousand. 

“Tt was the only way in to the hiding-place. Three 
hours after I found the trail I was there, in a little moun- 
tain valley, a pocket in the midst of lava peaks. ‘The 
whole place was.terraced for taro-patches, fruit trees grew 
there, and there were eight or ten grass huts. But as soon 
as I saw the inhabitants I knew what I’d struck. One 
sight of them was enough.” 


228 MARTIN EDEN 


“What did you do?” Ruth demanded breathlessly, 
listening, lik. any Desdemona, appalled and fascinated. 

“Nothing for me to do. ‘Their leader was a kind old 
fellow, pretty far gone, but he ruled like a king. He had 
disce »ered the little valley and founded the settlement — 
all.ot which was against the law. But he had guns, plenty 
of ammunition, and those Kanakas, trained to the shooting 
of wild cattle and wild pig, were dead shots. No, there 
wasn’t any running away for Martin Eden. He stayed — 
for three months.” 

“ But how did you escape?” 

“T’d have been there yet, if it hadn’t been for a girl 
there, a half-Chinese, quarter-white, and quarter-Hawaiian. 
She was a beauty, poor thing, and well educated. Her 
mother, in Honolulu, was worth a million or so. Well, 
this girl got me away at last. Her mother financed the 
settlement, you see, so the girl wasn’t afraid of being pun- 
ished for letting me go. But she made me swear, first, 
never to reveal the hiding-place; and I never have. This 
is the first time I have even mentioned it. The girl 
had just the first signs of leprosy. The fingers of her 
right hand were slightly twisted, and there was a small 
spot on her arm. That was all. I guess she is dead, 
now.” 

“But weren’t you frightened? And weren’t you glad 
to get away without catching that dreadful disease ?” 

“¢ Well,” he confessed, “ I was a bit shivery at first ; but I 
got used toit. I used to feel sorry for that poor girl, though. 
That made me forget to be afraid. She wassuch a beauty, 
in spirit as well as in appearance, and she was only slightly 
touched; yet she was doomed to lie there, living the life 
of a primitive savage and rotting slowly away. Leprosy 
is far more terrible than you can imagine it.” 

“ Poor thing,’ Ruth murmured softly. ‘It’s a wonder 
she let you get away.” 

** How do you mean?” Martin asked unwittingly. 

* Because she must have loved you,” Ruth said, still 
softly. ‘Candidly, now, didn’t she?” 

Martin’s sunburn had been bleached by his work in the 


MARTIN EDEN _.- 229 


laundry and by the indoor life he was living, while the 
hunger and the sickness had made his face even pale; and 
across this pallor flowed the slow wave of a blush. He 
was opening his mouth to speak, but Ruth shut him off. 

“Never mind, don’t answer; it’s not necessary,” she 
laughed. 

But it seemed to him there was something metallic in 
her laughter, and that the light in her eyes was cold. On 
the spur of the moment it reminded him of a gale he had 
once experienced in the North Pacific. And for the mo- 
ment the apparition of the gale rose before his eyes — 
a gale at night, with a clear sky and under a full moon, 
the huge seas glinting coldly in the moonlight. Next, he 
saw the girl in the leper refuge and remembered it was for 
love of him that she had let him go. 

“She was noble,” he said simply. ‘She gave me life.” 

That was all of the incident, but he heard Ruth muffle 
a dry sob in her throat, and noticed that she turned her 
face away to gaze out of the window. When she turned 
it back to him, it was compésed, and there was no hint of 
the gale in her eyes. 

“Tm such a silly,” she said plaintively. ‘But I can’t 
help it. I do so love you, Martin, Ido, I do. I shall grow 
more catholic in time, but at present I can’t help being 
jealous of those ghosts of the past, and you know your 
past is full of ghosts. 

“Tt must be,” she silenced his protest. “It could not 
be otherwise. And there’s poor Arthur motioning me to 
come. He’s tired waiting, And now good-by, dear. 

* There’s some kind of a mixture, put up by the drug- 
gists, that helps men to stop the use of tobacco,” she called 
back from the door, “and I am going to send you some.” 

The door closed, but opened again. 

So IsOsiedo, she whispered to him; and this time she 
was really gone. 

Maria, with worshipful eyes that none the less were 
keen to note the texture of Ruth’s garments and the cut 
of them (a cut unknown that produced an effect mysteri- 
ously beautiful), saw her to the carriage. The crowd of 


230 MARTIN EDEN 


disappointed urchins stared till the carriage disappeared 
from view, then transferred their stare to Maria, who 
had abruptly become the most important person on the 
street. But it was one of her progeny who blasted Maria’s 
reputation by announcing that the grand visitors had been 
for her lodger. After that Maria dropped back into her 
old obscurity and Martin began to notice the respectful 
manner in which he was regarded by the small fry of the 
neighborhood. As for Maria, Martin rose in her estima- 
tion a full hundred per cent, and had the Portuguese 
grocer witnessed that afternoon carriage-call he would 
have allowed Martin an additional three-dollars-and- 
eighty-five-cents’ worth of credit. 


CHAPTER XXVII 


THE sun of Martin’s good fortune rose. The day after 
Ruth’s visit, he received a check for three dollars from a 
New York scandal weekly in payment for three of his 
triolets. Two days later a newspaper published in Chicago 
accepted his “ Treasure Hunters,’. promising to pay ten 
dollars for it on publication. The price was small, but it 
was the first article he had written, his very first attempt 
to express his thought on the printed page. To cap every- 
thing, the adventure serial for boys, his second attempt, 
was accepted before the end of the week by a juvenile 
monthly calling itself Youth and Age. It was true the se- 
rial was twenty-one thousand words, and they offered to pay 
him sixteen dollars on publication, which was something 
like seventy-five cents a thousand words; but it was equally 
true that it was the second thing he had attempted to 
write and that he was himself thoroughly aware of its 
clumsy worthlessness. 

But even his earliest efforts were not marked with the 
clumsiness of mediocrity. What characterized them was 
the clumsiness of too great strength—the clumsiness 
which the tyro betrays when he crushes butterflies with 
battering rams and hammers out vignettes with a war- 
club. So it was that Martin was glad to sell his early 
efforts for songs. He knew them for what they were, and 
it had not taken him long to acquire this knowledge. 
What he pinned his faith to was his later work. He had 
striven to be something more thana mere writer of maga- 
zine fiction. He had sought to equip himself with the 
tools of artistry. On the other hand, he had not sacrificed 
strength. His conscious aim had been to increase his 
strength by avoiding excess of strength. Nor had he 

231 


232 MARTIN EDEN 


departed from his love of reality. His work was realism, 
though he had endeavored to fuse with it the fancies and 
beauties of imagination. What he sought was an impas- 
sioned realism, shot through with human aspiration and 
faith. What he wanted was life as it was, with all its 
spirit-groping and soul-reaching left in. 

He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two 

schools of fiction. One treated of man as a god, ignoring 
his earthly origin; the other treated of man as a clod, 
ignoring his heaven-sent dreams and divine possibilities. 
Both the god and the clod schools erred, in Martin’s es- 
timation, and erred through too great singleness of sight 
and purpose. ‘There was a compromise that approximated 
the truth, though it flattered not the school of god, while 
it challenged the brute-savageness of the school of clod. 
It was his story, ‘“ Adventure,” which had dragged with 
Ruth, that Martin believed had achieved his ideal of the 
true in fiction; and it was in an essay, ‘God and Clod,” 
that he had expressed his views on the whole general sub- 
ject. 
; But ‘“ Adventure,” and all that he deemed his best 
work, still went begging among the editors. His early — 
work counted for nothing in his eyes except for the 
money it brought, and his horror stories, two of which he 
had sold, he did not consider high work nor his best 
work. To him they were frankly imaginative and fan- 
tastic, though invested with all the glamour of the real, 
wherein lay their power. ‘This investiture of the gro- 
tesque and impossible with reality, he looked upon as a 
trick —a skilful trick at best. Great literature could not 
reside in such a field. Their artistry was high, but he de- 
nied the worthwhileness of artistry when divorced from 
humanness. The trick had been to fling over the face of 
his artistry a mask of humanness, and this he had done in 
the half-dozen or so stories of the horror brand he had 
written before he emerged upon the high peaks of “ Ad- 
venture,” “Joy,” “ The Pot,” and “ The Wine of Life.” 

The three dollars he received for the triolets he used to 
eke out a precarious existence against the arrival of the 





MARTIN EDEN 233 


White Mouse check. He cashed the first check with 
the suspicious Portuguese grocer, paying a dollar on 
account and dividing the remaining two dollars between 
the baker and the fruit store. Martin was not yet rich 
enough to afford meat, and he was on slim allowance 
when the White Mouse check arrived. He was divided 
on the cashing of it. He had never been in a bank in 
his life, much less been in one on business, and he had a 
naive and childlike desire to walk into one of the big 
banks down in Oakland and fling down his indorsed 
check for forty dollars. On the other hand, practical 
common sense ruled that he should cash it with his grocer 
and thereby make an impression that would later result in 
an increase of credit. Reluctantly Martin yielded to the 
claims of the grocer, paying his bill with him in full, and 
receiving in change a pocketful of jingling coin. Also, 
he paid the other tradesmen in full, redeemed his suit and 
his bicycle, paid one month’s rent on the type-writer, and 
paid Maria the overdue month for his room and a month 
in advance. ‘This left him in his pocket, for emergencies, 
a balance of nearly three dollars. 

In itself, this small sum seemed a fortune. Immedi- 
ately on recovering his clothes he had gone to see Ruth, 
and on the way he could not refrain from jingling the 
little handful of silver in his pocket. He had been so 
long without money that, like a rescued starving man 
who cannot let the unconsumed food out of his sight, 
Martin could not keep his hand off the silver. He was 
not mean, nor avaricious, but the money meant more than 
so many dollars and cents. It stood for success, and the , 
eagles stamped upon the coins were to him so many 
winged victories. 

It came to him insensibly that it was a very good 
world. It certainly appeared more beautiful to him. 
For weeks it had been a very dull and sombre world ; 
but now, with nearly all debts paid, three dollars jingling 
in his pocket, and in his mind the consciousness of success, 
the sun shone bright and warm, and even a rain-squall 
that soaked unprepared pedestrians seemed a mexy hap- 


234 MARTIN EDEN 


pening to him. When he starved, his thoughts had 
dwelt often upon the thousands he knew were starving 
the world over ; but now that he was feasted full, the fact 
of the thousands starving was no longer pregnant in his 
brain. He forgot about them, and, being in love, re- 
membered the countless lovers in the world. Without 
deliberately thinking about it, motzfs for love-lyrics began 
to agitate his brain. Swept away by the creative impulse, 
he got off the electric car, without vexation, two blocks 
beyond his crossing. 

He found a number of persons in the Morse home. 
Ruth’s two girl-cousins were visiting her from San Rafael, 
and Mrs. Morse, under pretext of entertaining them, was 
pursuing her plan of surrounding Ruth with young 
people. The campaign had begun during Martin’s en- 
forced absence, and was already in full swing. She was 
making a point of having at the house men who were do- 
ing things. ‘Thus, in addition to the cousins Dorothy 
and Florence, Martin encountered two university pro- 
fessors, one of Latin, the other of English; a young army 
officer just back from the Philippines, one-time school- 
mate of Ruth’s; a young fellow named Melville, private 
secretary to Joseph Perkins, head of the San Francisco 
Trust Company; and finally of the men, a live bank 
cashier, Charles Hapgood, a youngish man of thirty-five, 
graduate of Stanford University, member of the Nile Club 
and the Unity Club, and a conservative speaker for the 
Republican Party during campaigns —in short, a rising 
young man in every way. Among the women was one 
who painted portraits, another who was a professional 
musician, and still another who possessed the degree of 
Doctor of Sociology and who was locally famous for her 
social settlement work in the slums of San Francisco. 
But the women did not count for much in Mrs. Morse’s 
plan. At the best, they were necessary accessories. The 
men who did things must be drawn to the house some- 
how. 

“Don’t get excited when you talk,’ Ruth admonished 
Martiu, before the ordeal of introduction began. 


MARTIN EDEN 235 


He bore himself a bit stiffly at first, oppressed by a 
sense of his own awkwardness, especially of his shoulders, 
which were up to their old trick of threatening destruction 
- to furniture and ornaments. Also, he was rendered self- 
conscious by the company. He had never before been 
in contact with such exalted beings nor with so many of 
them. Melville, the bank cashier, fascinated him, and he 
resolved to investigate him at the first opportunity. For 
underneath Martin’s awe lurked his assertive ego, and 
he felt the urge to measure himself with these men and 
women and to find out what they had learned from the 
books and life which he had not learned. 

Ruth’s eyes roved to him frequently to see how he was 
getting on, and she was surprised and gladdened by the 
ease with which he got acquainted with her cousins. He 
certainly did not grow excited, while being seated re- 
moved from him the worry of his shoulders. Ruth knew 
them for clever girls, superficially brilliant, and she could 
scarcely understand their praise of Martin later that night 
at going to bed. But he, on the other hand, a wit in his 
own class, a gay quizzer and laughter-maker at dances 
and Sunday picnics, had found :the making of fun and the 
breaking of good-natured lances simple enough in this 
environment. Andon this evening success stood at his 


back, patting him on the shoulder and telling him that he © 


was making good, so that he could afford to laugh and 
make laughter and remain unabashed. 

Later, Ruth’s anxiety found justification. Martin and 
Professor Caldwell had got together in a conspicuous 
corner, and though Martin no longer wove the air with 
his hands, to Ruth’s critical eye he permitted his own 
eyes to flash and glitter too frequently, talked too rapidly 
and warmly, grew too intense, and allowed his aroused 
blood to redden his cheeks too much. He lacked decorum 
and control, and was in decided contrast to the young 
professor of English with whom he talked. 

But Martin was not concerned with appearances! He 
had been swift to note the other’s trained mind and to 
appreciate his command of knowledge. Furthermore, 


236 MARTIN EDEN 


Professor Caldwell did not realize Martin’s concept of the 
average English professor. Martin wanted him to talk 
shop, and, though he seemed averse at first, succeeded in 
making him do it. For Martin did not see why a man 
should not talk shop. 

“It’s absurd and unfair,” he had told Ruth weeks 
before, ‘this objection to talking shop. For what reason 
under the sun do men and women come together if not 
for the exchange of the best that is in them? And the 
best that is in them is what they are interested in, the 
thing by which they make their living, the thing they’ve 
specialized on and sat up days and nights over, and even 
dreamed about. Imagine Mr. Butler living up to social 
etiquette and enunciating his views on Paul Verlaine or 
the German drama or the novels of D’Annunzio. We'd 
be bored to death. I, for one, if I must listen to Mr. 
Butler, prefer to hear him talk about his law. It’s the 
best that is in him, and life is so short that I want the 
best of every man and woman I meet.” 

“ But,” Ruth had objected, “there are the topics of 
general interest to all.” 

“ There, you mistake,” he had rushed on. ‘All persons 
in society, all cliques in society —or, rather, nearly all 
persons and cliques—ape their betters. Now, who are 
the best betters? ‘The idlers, the wealthy idlers. They 
do not know, as a rule, the things known by the persons 
who are doing something in the world. ‘To listen to con- 
versation about such things would mean to be bored, 
wherefore the idlers decree that such things are shop and 
must not be talked about. Likewise they decree the 
things that are not shop and which may be talked about, 
and those things are the latest operas, latest novels, cards, 
billiards, cocktails, automobiles, horse shows, trout fishing, 
tuna-fishing, big-game shooting, yacht sailing, and so forth 
—and mark you, these are the things the idlers know. 
In all truth, they constitute the shop-talk of the idlers. 
And the funniest part of it is that many of the clever 
people, and all the would-be clever people, allow the idlers 
so to impose upon them. As for me, I want the best a 


MARTIN EDEN 237 


man’s got in him, call it shop vulgarity or anything you 
please.” 

And Ruth had not understood. This attack of his on 
the established had seemed to her just so much wilfulness 
of opinion. 

So Martin contaminated Professor Caldwell with his 
own earnestness, challenging him to speak his mind. As 
Ruth paused beside them she heard Martin saying :— 

“ You surely don’t pronounce such heresies in the Uni- 
versity of California? ” 

Professor Caldwell shrugged his shoulders. ‘The 
honest taxpayer and the politician, you know. Sacra- 
mento gives us our appropriations and therefore we kowtow 
to Sacramento, and to the Board of Regents, and to the 
party press, or to the press of both parties.” 

“ Yes, that’s clear ; but how about you?” Martin urged. 
“You must be a fish out of the water.” 

“ Hew like me, I imagine, in the university pond. Some- 
times I am fairly sure I am out of water, and that I should 
belong in Paris, in Grub Street, in a hermit’s cave, or in 
some sadly wild Bohemian crowd, drinking claret, — dago- 
red they call it in San Francisco,— dining in cheap restau- 
rants in the Latin Quarter, and expressing vociferously 
radical views upon allcreation. Really, I am frequently 
almost sure that I was cut out to be a radical. But then, 
there are so many questions on which I am not sure. I 
grow timid when I am face to face with my human frailty, 
which ever prevents me from grasping all the factors in 
any problem — human, vital problems, you know.” 

And as he talked on, Martin became aware that ‘to his 
own lips had come the “ Song of the Trade Wind” : — 


“T am strongest at noon, 
‘But under the moon 
I stiffen the bunt of the sail.” 


He was almost humming the words, and it dawned upon 
him that the other reminded him of the trade wind, of the 
Northeast Trade, steady, and cool, and strong. He was 
equable, he was to be relied upon, and withal there was a 


238 MARTIN EDEN 


certain bafflement about him. Martin had the feeling 
that he never spoke his full mind, just as he had often 
had the feeling that the trades never blew their strongest 
but always held reserves of strength that were never used. 
Martin’s trick of visioning was active asever. His brain 
was a most accessible storehouse of remembered fact and 
fancy, and its contents seemed ever ordered and spread 
for his inspection. Whatever occurred in the instant 
present, Martin’s mind immediately presented associated 
antithesis or similitude which ordinarily expressed them- 
selves to him in vision. It was sheerly automatic, and 
his visioning was an unfailing accompaniment to the living 
present. Just as Ruth’s face, in a momentary jealousy, | 
had called before his eyes a forgotten moonlight gale, and 
as Professor Caldwell made him see again the Northeast 
Trade herding the white billows across the purple sea, so, 
from moment to moment, not disconcerting but rather 
identifying and classifying, new memory-visions rose before 
him, or spread under his eyelids, or were thrown upon the 
screen of his consciousness. These visions came out of 
the actions and sensations of the past, out of things and 
events and books of yesterday and last week — a count- 
less host of apparitions that, waking or sleeping, forever 
thronged his mind. 

So it was, as he listened to Professor Caldwell’s easy 
flow of speech —the conversation of a clever, cultured 
man — that Martin kept seeing himself down all his past. 
He saw himself when he had been quite the hoodlum, 
wearing a “ stiff-rim ” Stetson hat and a square-cut, double- 
breasted coat, with a certain swagger to the shoulders and 
possessing the ideal of being as tough as the police per- 
mitted. He did not disguise it to himself, nor attempt to 
palliate it. At one time in his life he had been just a 
common hoodlum, the leader of a gang that worried the 
police and terrorized honest, working-class householders. 
But his ideals had changed. He glanced about him at 
the well-bred, well-dressed men and women, and breathed 
into his lungs the atmosphere of culture and refinement, 
and at the same moment:-the ghost of his early youth, in 


MARTIN EDEN 239 


stiff-rim and square-cut, with swagger. and toughness, 
stalked across the room. ‘This figure, of the corner hood- 
lum, he saw merge into himself, sitting and talking with 
- an actual university professor. 

For, after all, he had never found his permanent abiding 
place. He had fitted in wherever he found himself, been 
a favorite always and everywhere by virtue of holding his 
own at work and at play and by his willingness and abil- 
ity to fight for his rights and command respect. But he 
had never taken root. He had fitted in sufficiently to 
satisfy his fellows but not to satisfy himself. He had been 
perturbed always by a feeling of unrest, had heard always 
the call of something from beyond, and had wandered on 
through life seeking it until he found books and art and 
love. And here he was, in the midst of all this, the only 
one of all the comrades he had adventured with who 
could have made themselves eligible for the inside of the 
Morse home. 

But such thoughts and visions did not prevent him 
from following Professor Caldwell closely. And as he 
followed, comprehendingly and eritically, he noted the un- 
broken field of the other’s knowledge. As for himself, 
from moment to moment the conversation showed him 
gaps and open stretches, whole subjects with which he 
was unfamiliar. Nevertheless, thanks to his Spencer, he 
saw that he possessed the outlines of the field of knowledge. 
It was a matter only of time, when he would fill in the 
outline. Then watch out, he thought — ware shoal, every- 
body! He felt like sitting at the feet of the professor, 
worshipful and absorbent; but, as he listened, he began 
to discern a weakness in the other’s judgments — a weak- 
ness so stray and elusive that he might not have caught 
it had it not been ever present. And when he did catch 
it, he leapt to equality at once. 

Ruth came up to them a second time, just as Martin 
began to speak. 

“T’ll tell you where you are wrong, or, rather, what 
weakens your judgments,” he said. ‘You lack biology. 
It has no place in your scheme of things. — Oh, I mean 


240 MARTIN EDEN 


the real interpretative biology, from the ground up, from 
the laboratory and the test-tube and the vitalized inorganic 
right on up to the widest esthetic and sociological gen- 
eralizations.”’ 

Ruth was appalled. She had sat two lecture courses 
under Professor Caldwell and looked up to him as the 
living repository of all knowledge. 

“ T scarcely follow you,” he said dubiously. 

Martin was not so sure but what he had followed him. 

¢ Then I’ll try to explain,” he said. “I remember 
reading in Egyptian history something to the effect that 
understanding could not be had of Egyptian art without 
first studying the land question.” 

* Quite right,” the professor nodded. 

“¢ And it seems to me,” Martin continued, “that knowl- . 
edge of the land question, in turn, of all questions, for 
that matter, cannot be had without previous knowledge of 
the stuff and the constitution of life. How can we un- 
derstand laws and institutions, religions and customs, 
without understanding, not merely the nature of the crea- 
tures that made them, but the nature of the stuff out of 
which the creatures are made? Is literature less human 
than the architecture and sculpture of Egypt? Is there 
one thing in the known universe that is not subject to 
the law of evolution ? — Oh, I know there is an elaborate 
evolution of the various arts laid down, but it seems to me 
to be too mechanical. The human himself is left out. 
The evolution of the tool, of the harp, of music and song 
and dance, are all beautifully elaborated ; but how about 
the evolution of the human himself, the development of 
the basic and intrinsic parts that were in him before he 
made his first tool or gibbered his first chant ? It is that 
which you do not consider, and which I call biology. It 
is biology in its largest aspects. 

“TI know I express myself incoherently, but I’ve tried 
to hammer out the idea. It came to me as you were talk- 
ing, so | was not primed and ready to deliver it. You 
spoke yourself of the human frailty that prevented one 
from taking all the factors into consideration. And you, 


MARTIN EDEN 241 


in turn, — or so it seems to me, —leave out the biological 
factor, the very stuff out of which has been spun the fab- 
_ ric of all the arts, the warp and the woof of all human 
actions and achievements.” 

To Ruth’s amazement, Martin was not immediately 
crushed, and that the professor replied in the way he 
did struck her as forbearance for Martin’s youth. Pro- 
fessor Caldwell sat for a full minute, silent and fingering 
his watch chain. 

“Do you know,” he said at last, “I’ve had that same 
criticism passed on me once before—by a very great 
man, a scientist and evolutionist, Joseph Le Conte. 
But he is dead, and I thought to remain undetected ; and 
now you come along and expose me. Seriously, though — 
and this is confession —I think there is something in your 
contention — a great deal, in fact. Iam too classical, not 
enough up-to-date in the interpretative branches of science, 
and I can only plead the disadvantages of my education 
and a temperamental slothfulness that prevents me from 
doing the work. I wonder if you'll believe that I’ve 
_ never been inside a physics or chemistry laboratory? It 
is true, nevertheless. Le Conte was right, and so are 
you, Mr. Eden, at least to an extent—how much I do 
not know.” 

Ruth drew Martin away with her on a pretext; when 
she had got him aside, whispering : — 

“You shouldn’t have monopolized Professor Caldwell 
that way. ‘There may be others who want to talk with 
him.” 

“ My mistake,” Martin admitted contritely. “But Pd 
got him stirred up, and he was so interesting that I did 
not think. Do you know, he is the brightest, the most 
intellectual, man,I have ever talked with. And [ll tell 
you something else. I once thought that everybody who 
went to universities, or who sat in the high places in 
society, was just as brilliant and intelligent as he.” 

‘“‘ He’s an exception,” she answered. 

“T should say so. Whom do you want me to talk to 
now ? — Oh, say, bring me up against that cashier-fellow.”’ 

R 


242 MARTIN EDEN 


Martin talked for fifteen minutes with him, nor could 
Ruth have wished better behavior on her lover’s part. 
Not once did his eyes flash nor his cheeks flush, while the 
calmness and poise with which he talked surprised her. But 
in Martin’s estimation the whole tribe of bank cashiers fell 
a few hundred per cent, and for the rest of the evening 
he labored under the impression that bank cashiers and 
talkers of platitudes were synonymous phrases. ‘The 
army officer he found good-natured and simple, a healthy, 
wholesome young fellow, content to occupy the place in 
life into which birth and luck had flung him. On learn- 
ing that he had completed two years in the university, 
Martin was puzzled to know where he had stored it away. 
Nevertheless Martin liked him better than the platitudi- 
nous bank cashier. 

“ T really don’t object to platitudes,” he told Ruth later; 
‘‘but what worries me into nervousness is the pompous, 
smugly complacent, superior certitude with which they 
are uttered and the time taken to do it. Why, I could 
give that man the whole history of the Reformation in 
the time he took to tell me that the Union-Labor Party 
had fused with the Democrats. Do you know, he skins 
his words as a professional poker-player skins the cards 
that are dealt out to him. Some day Ill show you what 
I mean.” 

“I’m sorry you don’t like him,” was her reply. ‘ He’s 
a favorite of Mr. Butler’s. Mr. Butler says he is safe 
. and honest —calls him the Rock, Peter, and says that 
upon him any banking institution can well be built.” 

“T don’t doubt it— from the little I saw of him and 
the less I heard from him; but I don’t think so much of 
banks as I did. You don’t mind my speaking my mind 
this way, dear?” 

‘*No, no; it is most interesting.” 

“Yes,” Martin went on heartily, “I’m no more than a 
barbarian getting my first impressions of civilization. 
Such impressions must be entertainingly novel to the 
civilized person.” 

“ What did you think of my cousins?” Ruth queried. 


MARTIN EDEN 243 


“Tlked them better than the other women. There’s 
plenty of fun in them along with paucity of pretence.” 

“Then you did lke the other women ?” 

He shook his head. 

“That social-settlement woman is no more than a 
sociological poll-parrot. I swear, if you winnowed her 
out between the stars, like Tomlinson, there would be 
found in her not one original thought. As for the portrait- 
painter, she was a positive bore. She'd make a good wife 
for the cashier. And the musician woman! I don’t care 
how nimble her fingers are, how perfect her technique, how 
wonderful her expression —the fact is, she knows nothing 
about music.” 

‘She plays beautifully,” Ruth protested. 

“Yes, she’s undoubtedly gymnastic in the externals of 
music, but the intrinsic spirit of music is unguessed by 
her. JIasked her what music meant to her — you know 
Tm always curious to know that particular thing ; and 
she did not know what it meant to her, except that she 
adored it, that it was the greatest of the arts, and that it 
meant more than life to her.” * 

“ You were making them talk shop,” Ruth charged him. 

““T confess it. And if they were failures on shop, 
imagine my sufferings if they had discoursed on other sub- 
jects. Why, I used to think that up here, where all the 
advantages of culture were enjoyed —” He paused 
for a moment, and watched the youthful shade of 
himself, in stiff-rim and square-cut, enter the door and 
swagger across the room. “As I was saying, up here I 
thought all men and women were brilliant and radiant. | 
But now, from what little Pve seen of them, they strike me 
as a pack of ninnies, most of them, and ninety per cent of the 
remainder as bores. Now there’s Professor Caldwell — 
he’s different. He’s a man, every inch of him and every 
atom of his gray matter.” 

Ruth’s face brightened. 

“Tell me about him,” she urged. “Not what is large 
and brilliant —I know those qualities; but whatever you 
feel is adverse. I am most curiousto know.” 


944 MARTIN EDEN 


“ Perhaps Ill get myself in a pickle.”” Martin debated 
humorously for a moment. ‘Suppose you tell me first. 
Or maybe you find in him nothing less than the best.” 

‘‘T attended two lecture courses under him, and I have 
known him for two years; that is why I am anxious for 
your first impression.” 

‘Bad impression, you mean? Well, here goes. He is 
all the fine things you thinkabout him, I guess. At least, 
he is the finest specimen of intellectual man I have met ; 
but he is a man with a secret shame. 

“Oh, no, no!” he hastened to cry. ‘ Nothing paltry nor 
vulgar. What I mean is that he strikes me as a man who 
has gone to the bottom of things, and is so afraid of what 
he saw that he makes believe to himself that he never saw 
it. Perhaps that’s not the clearest way to express it. 
Here’s another way. A man who has found the path to 
the hidden temple but has not followed it; who has, per- 
haps, caught glimpses of the temple and striven afterward 
to convince himself that it was only a mirage of foliage. 
Yet another way. A man who could have done things 
but who placed no value on the doing, and who, all the 
time, in his innermost heart, is regretting that he has not 
done them ; who has secretly laughed at the rewards for 
doing, and yet, still more secretly, has yearned for the 
rewards and for the joy of doing.” : 

“I don’t read him that way,” she said. ‘And for that 
matter, I don’t see just what you mean.” 

“It is only a vague feeling on my part,’ Martin tem- 
porized. ‘I have no reason for it. It is only a feeling, 
and most likely itis wrong. You certainly should know 
him better than I.” 

From the evening at Ruth’s Martin brought away with 
him strange confusions and conflicting feelings. He was 
disappointed in his goal, in the persons he had climbed to . 
be with. On the other hand, he was encouraged with his 
success. The climb had been easier than he expected. 
He was superior to the climb, and (he did not, with false 
modesty, hide it from himself) he was superior to the 
beings among whom he had climbed — with the exception, 


MARTIN EDEN 245 


of course, of Professor Caldwell. About life and the 
books he knew more than they, and he wondered into what 
nooks and crannies they had cast aside their educations. 
He did not know that he was himself possessed of unusual 
brain vigor; nor did he know that the persons who were 
given to probing the depths and to thinking ultimate »” 
thoughts were not to be found in the drawing rooms of 
the world’s Morses ; nor did he dream that such persons 
were as lonely eagles sailing solitary in the azure sky far 
above the earth and its swarming freight of gregarious 
life. 


CHAPTER XXVIII 


But success had lost Martin’s address, and her messen- 
gers no longer came to his door. For twenty-five days, 
working Sundays and holidays, he toiled on “The 
Shame of the Sun,” a long essay of some thirty thousand 
words. It was a deliberate attack on the mysticism of 
the Maeterlinck school—an attack from the citadel of 
positive science upon the wonder-dreamers, but an at- 
tack nevertheless that retained much of beauty aad 
wonder of the sort compatible with ascertained fact. It 
was a little later that he followed up the attack with two 
short essays, “ The Wonder-Dreamers” and “ The Yard- 
stick of the Ego.” And on essays, long and short, he 
began to pay the travelling expenses from magazine to 
magazine. 

During the twenty-five days spent on “ The Shame of 
the Sun,” he sold hack-work to the extent of six dollars 
and fifty cents. A joke had brought in fifty cents, and a 
second one, sold to a high-grade comic weekly, had fetched 
a dollar. ‘Then two humorous poems had earned two 
dollars and three dollars respectively. Asa result, having 
exhausted his credit with the tradesmen (though he had 
increased his credit with the grocer to five dollars), his 
wheel and suit of clothes went back to the pawnbroker. 
The type-writer people were again clamoring for money, 
insistently pointing out that according to the agreement 
rent was to be paid strictly in advance. 

Encouraged by his several small sales, Martin went back 
to hack-work. Perhaps there was a living in it, after all. 
Stored away under his table were the twenty storiettes 
which had been rejected by the newspaper short-story 
syndicate. He read them over in order to find out how 
not to write newspaper storiettes, and so doing, reasoned 
out the perfect formula. He found that the news- 

246 


MARTIN EDEN 247 


paper storiette should never be tragic, should never end « 


unhappily, and should never contain beauty of language, 
subtlety of thought, nor real delicacy of sentiment. Sen- 
timent it must contain, plenty of it, pure and noble, of the 
sort that in his own early youth had brought his applause 
from “nigger heaven” — the “ For-God-my-country-and- 
the-Czar” and ‘“ I-may-be-poor-but-I-am-honest ” brand 
of sentiment. 

Having learned such precautions, Martin consulted “The 
Duchess” for tone, and proceeded to mix according to 
formula. The formula consists of three parts: (1) a pair 
of lovers are jarred apart; (2) by some deed or event 
they are reunited; (8) marriage bells. The third part 
was an unvarying quantity, but the first and second parts 
could be varied an infinite number of times. Thus, the 
pair of lovers could be jarred apart by misunderstood 
motives, by accident of fate, by jealous rivals, by irate 
parents, by crafty guardians, by scheming relatives, and 
so forth and so forth; they could be reunited by a brave 
deed of the man lover, by a similar deed of the woman lover, 
by change of heart in one loveror the other, by forced con- 
fession of crafty guardian, scheming relative, or jealous 
rival, by voluntary confession of same, by discovery of 
some unguessed secret, by lover storming girl’s heart, 
by lover making long and noble self-sacrifice, and so on, 
endlessly. It was very fetching to make the girl propose 
in the course of being reunited, and Martin discovered, 
bit by bit, other decidedly piquant and fetching ruses. 
But marriage bells at the end was the one thing he could 
take no liberties with; though the heavens rolled up as a 
scroll and the stars fell, the wedding bells must go on 
ringing just the same. In quantity, the formula pre- 
scribed twelve, hundred words minimum dose, fifteen 
hundred words maximum dose. 

Before he got very far along in the art of the storiette, 
Martin worked out half a dozen stock forms, which he 
always consulted when constructing storiettes. These 
forms were like the cunning tables used by mathemati- 
cians, which may be entered from top, bottom, right, and 


3 


248 MARTIN EDEN 


left, which entrances consist of scores of lines and dozens 
of columns, and from which may be drawn, without reason- 
ing or thinking, thousands of different conclusions, all 
unchallengably precise and true. ‘Thus, in the course 
of half an hour with his forms, Martin could frame up a 
dozen or so storiettes, which he put aside and filled in at 
his convenience. He found that he could fill one in, 
after a day of serious work, in the hour before going to 
bed. As he later confessed to Ruth, he could almost 
do it in his sleep. The real work was in constructing 
the frames, and that was merely mechanical. 

He had no doubt whatever of the efficacy of his formula, 
and for once he knew the editorial mind when he said 
positively to himself that the first two he sent off would 
bring checks. And checks they brought, for four dollars 
each, at the end of twelve days. 

In the meantime he was making fresh and alarming 
discoveries concerning the magazines. Though the 
Transcontinental had published “The Ring of Bells,” 
no check was forthcoming. Martin needed it, and he 
wrote for it. An evasive answer and a request for more 
of his work was all he received. He had gone hungry 
two days waiting for the reply, and it was then that he 
put his wheel back in pawn. He wrote regularly, twice 
a week, to the Transcontinental for his five dollars, 
though it was only semi-occasionally that he elicited a re- 
ply. He did not know that the Transcontinental had 
been staggering along precariously for years, that it 
was a fourth-rater, or a tenth-rater, without standing, with 
a crazy circulation that partly rested on petty bullying 
and partly on patriotic appealing, and with advertisements 
that were scarcely more than charitable donations. Nor 
did he know that the Transcontinental was the sole 
livelihood of the editor and the business manager, and 
that they could wring their livelihood out of it only by 
moving to escape paying rent and by never paying any 
bill they could evade. Nor could he have guessed that 
the particular five dollars that belonged to him had been 
appropriated by the business manager for the painting of 


MARTIN EDEN 249 


his house in Alameda, which painting he performed him- 
self, on week-day afternoons, because he could not afford 
_ to pay union wages and because the first scab he had 
employed had had a ladder jerked out from under him 
and been sent to the hospital with a broken collar-bone. 

The ten dollars for which Martin had sold “ Treasure 
Hunters” to the Chicago newspaper did not come to 
hand. The article had been published, as he had ascer- 
tained at the file in the Central Reading-room, but no 
word could he get from the editor. His letters were 
ignored. To satisfy himself that they had been received, 
he registered several of them. It was nothing less than 
robbery, he concluded —a cold-blooded steal; while he 
starved, he was pilfered of his merchandise, of his goods, 
the sale of which was the sole way of getting bread to eat. 

Youth and Age was a weekly, and it had published 
two-thirds of his twenty-one-thousand-word serial when 
it went out of business. With it went all hopes of get- 
ting his sixteen dollars. 

To cap the situation, “ The Pot,” which he looked upon 
as one of the best things he had written, was lost to him. 
In despair, casting about frantically among the magazines, 
he had sent it to The Billow, a society weekly in San 
Francisco. His chief reason for submitting it to that 
publication was that, having only to travel across the bay 
from Oakland, a quick decision could be reached. ‘Two 
weeks later he was overjoyed to see, in the latest number 
on the news-stand, his story printed in full, illustrated, 
and in the place of honor. He went home with leaping 
pulse, wondering how much they would pay him for one 
of the best things he had done. Also, the celerity with 
which it had been accepted and published was a pleasant 
thought to him. That the editor had not informed him 
of the acceptance made the surprise more complete. After 
waiting a week, two weeks, and half a week longer, des- 
peration conquered diffidence, and he wrote to the editor 
of The Billow, suggesting that possibly through some 
negligence of the business manager his little account had 
been overlooked. 


250 MARTIN EDEN 


Even if it isn’t more than five dollars, Martin thought 
to himself, it will buy enough beans and pea-soup to enable 
me to write half a dozen like it, and possibly as good. 

Back came a cool letter from the editor that at least 
elicited Martin’s admiration. 

“ We thank you,” it ran, “for your excellent contribu- 
tion. All of us in the office enjoyed it immensely, and, as 
you see, it was given the place of honor and immediate 
publication. We earnestly hope that you liked the illus- 
trations. 

“On rereading your letter it seems to us that you are 
laboring under the misapprehension that we pay for unso- 
licited manuscripts. This is not our custom, and of course 
yours was unsolicited. We assumed, naturally, when we 
received your story, that you understood the situation. 
We can only deeply regret this unfortunate misunder- 
standing, and assure you of our unfailing regard. Again, 
thanking you for your kind contribution, and hoping to 
receive more from you in the near future, we remain, etc.” 

There was also a postscript to the effect that though 
The Billow carried no free list, it took great pleasure 
in sending him a complimentary subscription for the ensu- 
ing year. 

After that experience, Martin typed at the top of the 
first sheet of all his manuscripts: “ Submitted at your 
usual rete.” 

Some day, he consoled himself, they will be submitted 
at my usual rate. 

He discovered in himself, at this period, a passion for 
perfection, under the sway of which he rewrote and pol- 
ished “ The Jostling Street,” ‘The Wine of Life,” “ Joy,” 
the “Sea Lyrics,” and others of his earlier work. As of 
old, nineteen hours of labor a day was all too little to suit 
him. He wrote prodigiously, and he read prodigiously, 
forgetting in his toil the pangs caused by giving up his 
tobacco. Ruth’s promised cure for the habit, flamboyantly 
labelled, he stowed away in the most inaccessible corner 
of his bureau. Especially during his stretches of famine 
he suffered from lack of the weed; but no matter how 


MARTIN EDEN 251 


often he mastered the craving, it remained with him as 
strong as ever. He regarded it as the biggest thing he 
‘had ever achieved. Ruth’s point of view was that he was 
doing no more than was right. She brought him the 
anti-tobacco remedy, purchased out of her glove money, 
and in a few days forgot all about it. 

His machine-made storiettes, though he hated them and 
derided them, were successful... By means of them he re- 
deemed all his pledges, paid most of his bills, and bought 
a new set of tires for his wheel. The storiettes at least 
kept the pot a-boiling and gave him time for ambitious 
work; while the one thing that upheld him was the forty 
dollars he had received from The White Mouse. He 
anchored his faith to that, and was confident that the 
really first-class magazines would pay an unknown writer 
at least an equal rate, if not a better one. But the thing 
was, how to get into the first-class magazines. His best 
stories, essays, and poems went begging among them, and 
yet, each month, he read reams of dull, prosy, inartistic 
stuff between all their various coyers. If only one editor, 
he sometimes thought, would descend from his high seat of 
pride to write me one cheering line! No matter if my 
work is unusual, no matter if it is unfit, for prudential 
reasons, for their pages, surely there must be some sparks 
in it, somewhere, a few, to warm them to some sort of ap- 
preciation. And thereupon he would get out one or an- 
other of his manuscripts, such as “ Adventure,” and read 
it over and over in a vain attempt to vindicate the editorial 
silence. 

As the sweet California spring came on, his period of 
plenty came to an end. For several weeks he had been 
worried by a strange silence on the part of the newspaper 
storiette syndicate. Then, one day, came back to him 
through the mail ten of his immaculate machine-made stori- 
ettes. They were accompanied by a brief letter to the 
effect that the syndicate was overstocked, and that some 
months would elapse before it would be in the market 
again for manuscripts. Martin had even been extravagant 
on the strength of those ten storiettes. Toward the last 


252 MARTIN EDEN 


the syndicate had been paying him five dollars each for 
them and accepting every one he sent. So he had looked 
upon the ten as good as sold, and he had lived accordingly, 
on a basis of fifty dollars in the bank. So it was that he 
entered abruptly upon a lean period, wherein he continued 
selling his earlier efforts to publications that would not 
pay and submitting his later work to magazines that 
would not buy. Also, he resumed his trips to the pawn- 
broker down in Oakland. A few jokes and snatches of 
humorous verse, sold to the New York weeklies, made ex- 
istence barely possible for him. It was at this time that 
he wrote letters of inquiry to the several great monthly 
and quarterly reviews, and learned in reply that they rarely 
considered unsolicited articles, and that most of their con- 
tents were written upon order by well-known specialists 
who were authorities in their various fields. 


CHAPTER XXIX 


It was a hard summer for Martin. Manuscript readers 
and editors were away on vacation, and publications that 
ordinarily returned a decision in three weeks now retained 
his manuscript for three months or more. The consolation 
he drew from it was that a saving in postage was effected 
by the deadlock. Only the robber-publications seemed to 
remain actively in business, and to them Martin disposed, 
of all his early efforts, such as “ Pearl-diving,” ‘The 
Sea as a Career,” “ Turtle-catching,” and “ The Northeast 
Trades.” For these manuscripts he never received a 
penny. It is true, after six months’ correspondence, he 
effected a compromise, whereby he received a safety razor 
for “ Turtle-catching,” and that The Acropolis, having 
agreed to give him five dollars cash and five yearly sub- 
scriptions for “ The Northeast Trades,” fulfilled the second 
part of the agreement. 

For a sonnet on Stevenson he managed to wring two 
dollars out of a Boston editor who was running a magazine 
with a Matthew Arnold taste and a penny-dreadful purse. 
“The Peri and the Pearl,” a clever skit of a poem of two 
hundred lines, just finished, white hot from his brain, won 
the heart of the editor of a San Francisco magazine pub- 
lished in the interest of a great railroad. When the editor 
wrote, offering him payment in transportation, Martin 
wrote back to inquire if the transportation was transferable. 
It was not, and so, being prevented from peddling it, he 
asked for the return of the poem. Back it came, with the 
editor’s regrets, and Martin sent it to San Francisco again, 
this time to The Hornet, a pretentious monthly that had 
been fanned into a constellation of the first magnitude by 
the brilliant journalist who founded it. But The Hor- 
net’s light had begun to dim long before Martin was 

253 


254 MARTIN EDEN 


born. The editor promised Martin fifteen dollars for the 
poem, but, when it was published, seemed to forget about 
it. Several of his letters being ignored, Martin indicted an 
angry one which drew areply. It was written by a new 
editor, who coolly informed Martin that he declined to be 
held responsible for the old editor’s mistakes, and that he 
did not think much of “ The Peri and the Pearl” anyway. 

But The Globe, a Chicago magazine, gave Martin the 
most cruel treatment of all. He had refrained from offer- 
ing his “Sea Lyrics” for publication, until driven to it 
by starvation. After having been rejected by a dozen 
magazines, they had come to rest in The Globe office. 
There were thirty poems in the collection, and he was to 
receive a dollar apiece for them. ‘The first month four 
were published, and he promptly received a check for four 
dollars; but when he looked over the magazine, he was 
appalled at the slaughter. In some cases the titles had 
been altered: “ Finis,” for instance, being changed to 
‘The Finish,” and “ The Song of the Outer Reef” to “The 
Song of the Coral Reef.” In one case, an absolutely dif- 
ferent title, a misappropriate title, was substituted. In 
place of his own, ‘ Medusa Lights,” the editor had printed, 
“The Backward Track.” But the slaughter in the body 
of the poems was terrifying. Martin groaned and sweated 
and thrust his hands through his hair. Phrases, lines, and 
stanzas were cut out, interchanged, or juggled about in 
the most incomprehensible manner. Sometimes lines and 
stanzas not his own were substituted for his. He could 
not believe that a sane editor could be guilty of such mal- 
treatment, and his favorite hypothesis was that his poems 
must have been doctored by the office boy or the stenog- 
rapher. Martin wrote immediately, begging the editor 
to cease publishing the lyrics and to return them to him. 
He wroteagain and again, begging, entreating, threatening, 
but his letters were ignored. Month by month the slaugh- 
ter went on till the thirty poems were published, and 
month by month he received a check for those which 
had appeared in the current number. 

Despite these various misadventures, the memory of 


MARTIN EDEN ‘ 255 


the White Mouse forty-dollar check sustained him, though 
he was driven more and more to hack-work. He discov- 
ered a bread-and-butter field in the agricultural week- 
lies and trade journals, though among the religious week- 
lies he found he could easily starve. At his lowest ebb, 
when his black suit. was in pawn, he made a ten-strike — 
or so it seemed to him —in a prize contest arranged by 
the County Committee of the Republican Party. There 
were three branches of the contest, and he entered them 
all, laughing at himself bitterly the while in that he was 
driven to such straits to live. His poem won the first 
prize of ten dollars, his campaign song the second prize of 
five dollars, his essay on the principles of the Republican 
Party the first prize of twenty-five dollars. Which was 
very gratifying to him until he tried to collect. Some- 
thing had gone wrong in the County Committee, and, 
though a rich banker and a state senator were members of 
it, the money was not forthcoming. While this affair was 
hanging fire, he proved that he understood the principles 
of the Democratic Party by winning the first prize for his 
essay in a similar contest. And, moreover, he received 
the money, twenty-five dollars. But the forty dollars won 
in the first contest he never received. 

Driven to shifts in order to see Ruth, and deciding that 
the long walk from north Oakland to her house and back 
again consumed too much time, he kept his black suit in 
pawn in place of his bicycle. The latter gave him exer- 
cise, saved him hours of time for work, and enabled him to 
see Ruth just the same. A pair of knee duck trousers and 
an old sweater made him a presentable wheel costume, so 
that he could go with Ruth on afternoon rides. Besides, 
he no longer had opportunity to see much of her in her 
own home, where Mrs. Morse was thoroughly prosecuting 
her campaign of entertainment. The exalted beings he 
met there, and to whom he had looked up but a short time 
before, now bored him. ‘They were no longer exalted. He 
was nervous and irritable, what of his hard times, disap- 
pointments, and close application to work, and the conver- 
sation of such people was maddening. He was not unduly 


256 MARTIN EDEN 


egotistic. He measured the narrowness of their minds by 
the minds of the thinkers in the books he read. At Ruth’s 
home he never met a large mind, with the exception of 
Professor Caldwell, and Caldwell he had met there only 
once. As for the rest, they were numskulls, ninnies, super- 
ficial, dogmatic, and ignorant. It was their ignorance that 
astounded him. What was the matter withthem? What 
had they done with their educations? They had had ac- 
cess to the same books he had. How did it happen that 
they had drawn nothing from them? 

He knew that the great minds, the deep and rational 
thinkers, existed. He had his proofs from the books, the 
books that had educated him beyond the Morse standard. 
And he knew that higher intellects than those of the Morse 
circle were to be found in the world. He read English 
society novels, wherein he caught glimpses of men and 
women talking politics and philosophy. And he read of 
salons in great cities, even in the United States, where 
art and intellect congregated. Foolishly, in the past, he 
had conceived that all well-groomed persons above the 
working class were persons with power of intellect and 
vigor of beauty. Culture and collars had gone together, 
to him, and he had been deceived into believing that col- 
lege educations and mastery were the same things. 

Well, he would fight his way on and up higher. And 
he would take Ruth with him. Her he dearly loved, and 
he was confident that she would shine anywhere. As it 
was clear to him that he had been handicapped by his 
early environment, so now he perceived that she was 
similarly handicapped. She had not had a _ chance 
toexpand. The books on her father’s shelves, the paintings 
on the walls, the music on the piano—all was just so much 
meretricious display. To real literature, real painting, 
real music, the Morses and their kind, weredead. And big- 
ger than such things was life, of which they were densely, 
hopelessly ignorant. In spite of their Unitarian procliv- 
ities and their masks of conservative broadmindedness, 
they were two generations behind interpretative science: - 
their mental processes were medizval, while their thinking 


MARTIN EDEN 207 


on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe struck 
him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as 
the youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older — the 
same that moved the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the 
dark; that moved the first hasty Hebrew savage to incar- 
nate Eve from Adam’srib; that moved Descartes to build 
an idealistic system of the universe out of the projections 
of his own puny ego; and that moved the famous British 
ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so scathing as 
to win immediate applause and leave his name a notorious 
scrawl on the page of history. 

So Martin thought, and he thought further, till it dawned 
upon him that the difference between these lawyers, officers, 
business men, and bank cashiers he had met and the mem- 
bers of the working class he had known was on a par with 
the difference in the food they ate, clothes they wore, 
neighborhoods in which they lived. Certainly, in all of 
them was lacking the something more which he found in 
himself and in the books. ‘The Morses had shown him the 
best their social position could produce, and he was not 
impressed by it. A pauper himself,a slave to the money- 
lender, he knew himself the superior of those he met at 
the Morses’; and, when his one decent suit of clothes was 
out of pawn, he moved among them a lord of life, quivering 
with a sense of outrage akin to what a prince would suffer 
if condemned to live with goat-herds. 

‘‘You hate and fear the socialists,” he remarked to Mr. 
Morse, one evening at dinner; “but why? You know 
neither them nor their doctrines.” 

The conversation had been swung in that direction by 
Mrs. Morse, who had been invidiously singing the praises 
of Mr. Hapgood. ‘The cashier was Martin’s black beast, 
and his temper was a trifle short where the talker of plati- 
tudes was concerned. 

“Yes,” he had said, “Charley Hapgood is what they 
callarising young man—somebody told measmuch. And 
it is true. He’ll make the Governor’s Chair before he dies, 
and, who knows? maybe the United States Senate.” 

“ What makes you think so?” Mrs. Morse had inquired. 

5 


258 MARTIN EDEN 


“T’ve heard him make a campaign speech. It was so 
cleverly stupid and unoriginal, and also so convincing, 
that the leaders cannot help but regard him as safe and 
sure, while his platitudes are so much like the platitudes 
of the average voter that — oh, well, you know you flatter 
any man by dressing up his own thoughts for him and 
presenting them to him.” 

“T actually think you are jealous of Mr. Hapgood,” 
Ruth had chimed in. 

“¢ Heaven forbid! ” 

The look of horror on Martin’s face stirred Mrs. Morse 
to belligerence. 

“You surely don’t mean to say that Mr. Hapgood is 
stupid ?”’ she demanded icily. 

‘*No more than the average Republican,” was the retort, 
“or average Democrat, either. They are all stupid when 
they are not crafty, and very few of them are crafty. 
«Lhe only wise Republicans are the millionnaires and their 
~conscious henchmen. ‘They know which side their bread 
is buttered on, and they know why.” 

“Tama Republican,” Mr. Morse putin lightly. “ Pray, 
how do you classify me?” 

“Oh, you are an unconscious henchman.” 

“ Henchman ?”’ 

“Why, yes. You do corporation work. You have no 
working-class nor criminal practice. You don’t depend 
upon wife-beaters and pickpockets for your income. You 
get your livelihood from the masters of society, and who- 
ever feeds a man is that man’s master. Yes, you are a 
henchman. You are interested in advancing the interests 
of the aggregations of capital you serve.” 

Mr. Morse’s face was a trifle red. 

“IT confess, sir,” he said, “that you talk like a scoun- 
drelly socialist.” 

Then it was that Martin made his remark : — 

“You hate and fear the socialists; but why? You 
know neither them nor their doctrines.” 

“Your doctrine certainly sounds like socialism,” Mr. 
Morse replied, while Ruth gazed anxiously from one to 


MARTIN EDEN 259 


the other, and Mrs. Morse beamed happily at the oppor- 
tunity afforded of rousing her liege lord’s antagonism. 
‘ Because I say Republicans are stupid, and hold that 


liberty, equality, and fraternity are exploded bubbles, does ” 


not make me a socialist,” Martin said with a smile. “ Be- 
cause I question Jefferson and the unscientific Frenchmen 
who informed his mind, does not make me a socialist. 
Believe me, Mr. Morse, you are far nearer socialism than 
I who am its avowed enemy.” 

“Now you please to be facetious,” was all the other 
could say. 

“Not at all. I speak in all seriousness. You still 
believe in equality, and yet you do the work of the cor- 
porations, and the corporations, from day to day, are 
busily engaged in burying equality. And you call me 
a socialist because I deny equality, because I affirm just 
what you liveup to. The Republicans are foes to equality, 
though most of them fight the battle against equality with 
the very word itself the slogan on their ips. In the name 
of equality they destroy equality. That was whyI called 
them stupid. As for myself, I am an individualist. I 
believe the race is to the swift, the battle to the strong. \y 
Such is the lesson I have learned from biology, or at least 
think I have learned. As I said, I am an individualist, 
and individualism is the hereditary and eternal foe of 
socialism.” 

“ But you frequent socialist meetings,’ Mr. Morse 
challenged. 

“ Certainly, just as spies frequent hostile camps. How 
else are you to learn about the enemy? Besides, I enjoy | 
myself at their meetings. They are good fighters, and, 
right or wrong, they have read the books. Any one of 
them knows far more about sociology and all the other 
ologies than the average captain of industry. Yes, I have 
been to half a dozen of their meetings, but that doesn’t 
make me a socialist any more than hearing Charley Hap- 
good orate made me a Republican.” 

“T can’t help it,” Mr. Morse said feebly, “but I still 
believe you incline that way.” 


260 MARTIN EDEN 


Bless me, Martin thought to himself, he doesn’t know 
what I was talking about. He hasn’t understood a word 
of it.. What did he do with his education, anyway ? 

Thus, in his development, Martin found himself face to 
face with economic morality, or the morality of class; and 


soon it became to him a grisly monster. Personally, he 


was an intellectual moralist, and more offending to him 
than platitudinous pomposity was the morality of those 
about him, which was a curious hotchpotch of the eco- 
nomic, the metaphysical, the sentimental, and the imitative. 

A sample of this curious messy mixture he encountered 
nearer home. His sister Marian had been keeping com- 
pany with an industrious young mechanic, of German 
extraction, who, after thoroughly learning the trade, had 
set up for himself in a bicycle-repair shop. Also, having 
got the agency for a low-grade make of wheel, he was 
prosperous. Marian had called on Martin in his room a 
short time before to announce her engagement, during 
which visit she had playfully inspected Martin’s palm and 
told his fortune. On her next visit she brought Hermann 
von Schmidt along with her. Martin did the honors and 
congratulated both of them in language so easy and 
graceful as to affect disagreeably the peasant-mind of his 
sister’s lover. This bad impression was further height- 
ened by Martin’s reading aloud the half-dozen stanzas of 
verse with which he had commemorated Marian’s previous 
visit. It was a bit of society verse, airy and delicate, 
which he had named “ The Palmist.”» He was surprised, 
when he finished reading it, to note no enjoyment in his 
sister’s face. Instead, her eyes were fixed anxiously upon 
her betrothed, and Martin, following her gaze, saw spread 
on that worthy’s asymmetrical features nothing but black 
and sullen disapproval. The incident passed over, they 
made an early departure, and Martin forgot all about 
it, though for the moment he had been puzzled that any 
woman, even of the working class, should not have been 
ae Ti and delighted by having poetry written about 

er. 

Several evenings later Marian again visited him, this 


MARTIN EDEN 261 


time alone. Nor did she waste time in coming to the 
point, upbraiding him sorrowfully for what he had done. 

“Why, Marian,” he chided, “ you talk as though you 
were ashamed of your relatives, or of your brother at any 
rate.” 

‘And I am, too,” she blurted out. 

Martin was bewildered by the tears of mortification he 
saw in her eyes. The mood, whatever it was, was genuine. 

“But, Marian, why should your Hermann be jealous 
of my writing poetry about my own sister?” 

“He ain’t jealous,” she sobbed. ‘He says it was in- 
decent, ob — obscene.”’ 

Martin emitted a long, low whistle of incredulity, then 
proceeded to resurrect and read a carbon copy of “ ‘The 
Palmist.” 

“T can’t see it,” he said finally, proffering the manu- 
script to her. ‘Read it yourself and show me whatever 
strikes you as obscene —that was the word, wasn’t it?” . 

“He says so, and he ought to know,” was the answer, 
with a wave aside of the manuscript, accompanied by a 
look of loathing. ‘And he says you’ve got to tear it up. 
He says he won’t have no wife of his with such things 
written about her which anybody can read. He says it’s 
a disgrace, an’ he won’t stand for it.” 

‘“‘ Now, look here, Marian, this is nothing but nonsense,” 
Martin began; then abruptly changed his mind. 

He saw before him an unhappy girl, knew the futility of 
attempting to convince her husband or her, and, though 
the whole situation was absurd and preposterous, he re- 
solved to surrender. 

* All right,” he announced, tearing the manuscript into 
half a dozen pieces and throwing it into the waste-basket. 

He contented himself with the knowledge that even then 
the original typewritten manuscript was reposing in the 
office of a New York magazine. Marian and her husband 
would never know, and neither himself nor they nor the 
world would lose if the pretty, harmless poem ever were 
published. 

Marian, starting to reach into the waste-basket, refrained. 


262 MARTIN EDEN 


“Can I?” she pleaded. 

He nodded his head, regarding her thoughtfully as she 
gathered the torn pieces of manuscript and tucked them 
into the pocket of her jacket— ocular evidence of the 
success of her mission. She reminded him of Lizzie 
Connolly, though there was less of fire and gorgeous 
flaunting life in her than in that other girl of the work- 
ing class whom he had seen twice. But they were ona 
par, the pair of them, in dress and carriage, and he smiled 
with inward amusement at the caprice of his fancy which 
suggested the appearance of either of them in Mrs. Morse’s 
drawing-room. ‘The amusement faded, and he was aware 
of a great loneliness. This sister of his and the Morse 


\.“ drawing-room were milestones of the road he had travelled. 


And he had left them behind. He glanced affectionately 
about him at his few books. ‘They were all the comrades 
left to him. 

“‘ Hello, what’s that?” he demanded in startled surprise. 

Marian repeated her question. 

“ Why don’t I go to work?” He broke into a laugh 
that was only half-hearted. “That Hermann of yours 
has been talking to you.” 

She shook her head. 

* Don’t lie,” he commanded, and the nod of her head 
affirmed his charge. 

“Well, you tell that Hermann of yours to mind his 
own business; that when I write poetry about the girl 
he’s keeping company with it’s his business, but that out- 
side of that he’s got no say so. Understand ? 

“So you don’t think I’ll succeed as a writer, eh?” he 
went on. “You think I’m no good?—that I’ve fallen: 
down and am a disgrace to the family ?” 
» “TI think it would be much better if you got a job,” she 
“said firmly, and he saw she was sincere. ‘ Hermann 
says —” 

“Damn Hermann!” he broke out good-naturedly. 
“ What I want to know is when yow’re going to get married. 
Also, you find out from your Hermann if he will deign to 
permit you to accept a wedding present from me.” 


MARTIN EDEN 263 


He mused over the incident after she had gone, and 
once or twice broke out into laughter that was bitter as 
he saw his sister and her betrothed, all the members of 
his own class and the members of Ruth’s class, directing 


their narrow little lives by narrow little formulas —herd- \,/ 


creatures, flocking together and patterning their lives by — 
one another’s opinions, failing of being individuals and 
of really living life because of the childlike formulas by 
which they were enslaved. He summoned them before 
him in apparitional procession: Bernard Higginbotham 
arm in arm with Mr. Butler, Hermann von Schmidt cheek 
by jowl with Charley Hapgood, and one by one and in 
pairs he judged them and dismissed them — judged them 
by the standards of intellect and morality he had learned 
from the books. Vainly he asked: Where are the great 
souls, the great men and women? He found them not 
among the careless, gross, and stupid intelligences that” 
answered the call of vision to his narrow room. He felt 
a loathing for them such as Circe must have felt for 
her swine. When he had dismissed the last one and 
thought himself alone, a late-comer entered, unexpected 
and unsummoned. Martin watched him and saw the 
stiff-rim, the square-cut, double-breasted coat and the 
swaggering shoulders, of the youthful hoodlum who had 
once been he. 

“You were like all the rest, young fellow,” Martin 
sneered. ‘“ Your morality and your knowledge were just 
the same as theirs. You did not think and act for yourself. 
Your opinions, like your clothes, were ready made; your », 
acts were shaped by popular approval. You were cock | 
of your gang because others acclaimed you the real thing. 
You fought and ruled the gang, not because you liked to, 
—you know you really despised it, — but because the other 
fellows patted you on the shoulder. You licked Cheese- 
Face because you wouldn’t give in, and you wouldn’t 
give in partly because you were abysmal brute and for 
the rest because you believed what every one about you 
believed, that the measure of manhood was the carnivo- 
rous ferocity displayed in injuring and marring fellow- 


264 MARTIN EDEN 


creatures’ anatomies. Why, you whelp, you even won 
other fellows’ girls away from them, not because you 
wanted the girls, but because in the marrow of those 
about you, those who set your moral pace, was the in- 
stinct of the wild stallion and the bull-seal. Well, the 
years have passed, and what do you think about it 
now?” 

As if in reply, the vision underwent a swift metamor- 
phosis. ‘The stiff-rim and the square-cut vanished, being 
replaced by milder garments; the toughness went out 
of the face, the hardness out of the eyes; and the face, 
chastened and refined, was irradiated from an inner life 
of communion with beauty and knowledge. ‘The appari- 
tion was very like his present self, and, as he regarded 
it, he noted the student-lamp by which it was illuminated, 
and the book over which it pored. He glanced at the 
title and read, “The Science of /Esthetics.”” Next, 
he entered into the apparition, trimmed the student- 
lamp, and himself went on reading “The Science of 
Esthetics.” 


CHAPTER XXX 


ON a beautiful fall day, a day of similar Indian sum- 
mer to that which had seen their love declared the year 
before, Martin read his “* Love-cycle” to Ruth. It was in 
the afternoon, and, as before, they had ridden out to 
their favorite knoll in the hills. Now and again she had 
interrupted his reading with exclamations of pleasure, 
and now, as he laid the last sheet of manuscript with 
its fellows, he waited her judgment. 

She delayed to speak, and at last she spoke haltingly, 
hesitating to frame in words the harshness of her thought. 

“T think they are beautiful, very beautiful,” she said; 
“but you can’t sell them, can you? You see, what I 


mean,’ she said, almost pleaded. ‘This writing of yours, .. 


is not practical. Something is the matter — maybe it is 
with the market—that prevents you from earning a 
living by it. And please, dear, don’t misunderstand me. 
I am flattered, and made proud, and all that—I could 
not be a true woman were it otherwise — that you should 
write these poems to me. But they do not make our 
marriage possible. Don’t you see, Martin? Don’t think 
me mercenary. It is love, the thought of our future, 
with which I am burdened. A whole year has gone by 
since we learned we loved each other, and our wedding 
day is no nearer. Don’t think me immodest in thus 
talking about .our wedding, for really I have my heart, 
all that Iam, at stake. Why don’t you try to get work on 
a newspaper, if you are so bound up in your writing? 
Why not become a reporter? — for a while, at least?” 

“Tt would spoil my style,” was his answer, in a low, 
monotonous voice. ‘ You have no idea how I’ve worked 
for style.” 

265 


266 MARTIN EDEN 


‘“ But those storiettes,” she argued. ‘ You called them 
hack-work. You wrote many of them.- Didn’t they spoil 
your style?” 

“No, the cases are different. The storiettes were 
ground out, jaded, at the end of a long day of appli- 
cation to style. But a reporter’s work is all hack from 
morning till night, is the one paramount thing of life. 
And it is a whirlwind life, the life of the moment, with 
neither past nor future, and certainly without thought of 
any style but reportorial style, and that certainly is not 
literature. To become a reporter now, just as my style 
is taking form, crystallizing, would be to commit literary. 
suicide. As it is, every storiette, every word of every 
storiette, was a violation of myself, of my self-respect, 
of my respect for beauty. I tell you it was sickening. 
Iwas guilty of sin. And I was secretly glad when the 
markets failed, even if my clothes did go into pawn. 
But the joy of writing the ‘Love-cycle’! The creative 
joy in its noblest form! ‘That was compensation for 
everything.” 

Martin did not know that Ruth was unsympathetic 
concerning the creative joy. She used the phrase — it 
was on her lips he had first heard it. She had read about 
it, studied about it, in the university in the course of 
earning her Bachelorship of Arts; but she was not origi- 
nal, not creative, and all manifestations of culture on her 
part were but harpings of the harpings of others. 

“May not the editor have been right in his revision of 
your ‘Sea Lyrics’?” she questioned. ‘ Remember, an edi- 
tor must have proved qualifications or else he would not 
be an editor.” 

“ That’s in line with the persistence of the established,” 
he rejoined, his heat against the editor-folk getting the 
better of him. ‘“ What is, is not only right, but is the best 
possible. The existence of anything is sufficient vindica- 
tion of its fitness to exist —to exist, mark you, as the 
average person unconsciously believes, not merely in pres- 
ent conditions, but in all conditions. It is their ignorance, 
of course, that makes them believe such rot — their igno- 


MARTIN EDEN 267 


rance, which is nothing more nor less than the henidical 
mental process described by Weininger. They think they 
think, and such thinkless creatures are the arbiters of the 
lives of the few who really think.” 

He paused, overcome by the consciousness that he had 
been talking over Ruth’s head. 

“T’m sure I don’t know who this Weininger is,” she 
retorted. ‘* And you are so dreadfully general that I fail 
to follow you. What I was speaking of was the qualifi- 
cation of editors —” 

“ And [ll tell you,” he interrupted. ‘ The chief quali- 
fication of ninety-nine per cent of all editors is failure. 
They have failed as writers. Don’t think they prefer the 
drudgery of the desk and the slavery to their circulation and 
to the business manager to the joy of writing. They have 
tried to write, and they have failed. And right there is the 
cursed paradox of it. Every portal to success in literature _ 
is guarded by those watch-dogs, the failures in literature. — 
The editors, sub-editors, associate editors, most of them, / 
and the manuscript-readers for the magazines and book- 
publishers, most of them, nearly all of them, are men who 
wanted to write and who have failed. And yet they, of 
all creatures under the sun the most unfit, are the very 
creatures who decide what shall and what shall not find 
its way into print — they, who have proved themselves not 
original, who have demonstrated that they lack the divine 
fire, sit in judgment upon originality and genius. And 
after them come the reviewers, just so many more failures. 
Don’t tell me that they have not dreamed the dream and 
attempted to write poetry or fiction; for they have, and 
they have failed. Why, the average review is more nau- 
seating than cod-liver oil. But you know my opinion on 
the reviewers and the alleged critics. There are great 
critics, but they are as rare as comets. If I fail as a 
writer, I shall have proved for the career of editorship. 
There’s bread and butter and jam, at any rate.” 

Ruth’s mind was quick, and her disapproval of her lov- 
er’s views was buttressed by the contradiction she found 
in his contention. 


268 ) MARTIN EDEN 


‘¢But, Martin, if that be so, if all the doors are closed as 
you have shown so conclusively, how is it possible that 
any of the great writers ever arrived ?” 

“They arrived by achieving the impossible,” he an- 
swered. ‘They did such blazing, glorious work as to 
burn to ashes those that opposed them. ‘They arrived by 
course of miracle, by winning a thousand-to-one wager 
against them. ‘They arrived because they were Carlyle’s 
battle-scarred giants who will not be kept down. And that 
is what I must do; I must achieve the impossible.” 

“But ifyou fail? You must consider me as well, Martin.” 

“Tf I fail?” He regarded her for a moment as though 
the thought she had uttered was unthinkable. Then in- 
telligence illumined his eyes. “If I fail, I shall become 
an editor, and you will be an editor’s wife.” 

She frowned at his facetiousness—a pretty, adorable 
frown that made him put hisarmaround herand kiss it away. 

“ There, that’s enough,” she urged, by an effort of will 
withdrawing herself from the fascination of his strength. 
“T have talked with father and mother. I never before 
asserted myself so against them. I demanded to be heard. 
I was very undutiful. They are against you, you know ; 
but I assured them over and over of my abiding love for 
you, and at last father agreed that if you wanted to, you 
could begin right away in his office. And then, of his 
own accord, he said he would pay you enough at the start 
so that we could get married and have a little cottage 
somewhere. Which I think was very fine of him— don’t 
yon?” 

Martin, with the dull pain of despair at his heart, me- 
chanically reaching for the tobacco and paper (which he 
no longer carried) to roll a cigarette, muttered something 
inarticulate, and Ruth went on. 

“ Frankly, though, and don’t let it hurt you — I tell yeu, 
to show you precisely how you stand with him — he doesn’t 
like your radical views, and he thinks you are lazy. Of 
course I know you are not. I know you work hard.” 

How hard, even she did not know, was the thought in 
Martin’s mind. 


MARTIN EDEN 269 


“ Well, then,” he said, “ how about my views? Do you 
think they are so radical?” 

He held her eyes and waited the answer. 

“JT think them, well, very disconcerting,” she replied. 

The question was answered for him, and so oppressed 
was he by the grayness of hfe that he forgot the tentative 
proposition she had made for him to go to work. And 
she, having gone as far as she dared, was willing to 
wait the answer till she should bring the question up 
again. 

She had not long to wait. Martin had a question of 
his own to propound to her. He wanted to ascertain the 
measure of her faith in him, and within the week each 
was answered. Martin precipitated it by reading to her 
his “The Shame of the Sun.” 

“ Why don’t you become a reporter?” she asked when 
he had finished. ‘You love writing so, and I am sure 
you would succeed. You could rise in journalism and 
make a name for yourself. There are a number of great 
special correspondents. Their salaries are large, and 
their field is the world. They are sent everywhere, to 
the heart of Africa, like Stanley, or to interview the 
Pope, or to explore unknown Thibet.”’ | 

“Then you don’t like my essay?” he rejoined. ‘ You 
believe that I have some show in journalism but none in 
literature ?” 

“No,no; I dolikeit. Itreadswell. But I am afraid 
it’s over the heads of your readers. At least it is over 
mine. It sounds beautiful, but I don’t understand it. 
Your scientific slang is beyond me. You are an ex- 
tremist, you know, dear, and what may be intelligible 
to you may not be intelligible to the rest of us.” 

“] imagine it’s the philosophic slang that bothers you,” 
was all he could say. 

He was flaming from the fresh reading of the ripest 
thought he had expressed, and her verdict stunned him. 

“No matter how poorly it is done,” he persisted, *‘ don’t 
you see anything in it ?— in the thought of it, I mean?” 

She shook her head. 


270 MARTIN EDEN 


“No, it is so different from anything I have read. I 
read Maeterlinck and understand him —” 

“ His mysticism, you understand that ?”’ Martin flashed 
out. 

“Yes, but this of yours, which is supposed to be an 
attack upon him, I don’t understand. Of course, if 
originality counts — ”’ 

He stopped her with an impatient gesture that was not 
followed by speech. He became suddenly aware that she 
was speaking and that she had been speaking for some 
time. 

« After all, your writing has been a toy to you,” she 
was saying. “Surely you have played with it long 
enough. It is time to take up life seriously — our life, 
“Martin. Hitherto you have lived solely your own.” 

“You want me to go to work ?” he asked. 

“Yes. Father has offered —” 

“JT understand all that,” he broke in; “but what I 
want to know is whether or not you have lost faith in 
me ? 99 ’ 

She pressed his hand mutely, her eyes dim. 

“Tn your writing, dear,” she admitted in a half-whisper. 

“You've read lots of my stuff,” he went on brutally. 
“What do you think of it? Is it utterly hopeless? 
How does it compare with other men’s work ?” 

“But they sell theirs, and you — don’t.” 

“That doesn’t answer my question. Do you think that 
literature is not at all my vocation ?” 

“Then I will answer.” She steeled herself to do it. 
“TI don’t think you were made to write. Forgive me, 
dear. You compel me to say it; and you know I know 
more about literature than you do.” 

“Yes, you are a Bachelor of Arts,” he said medita- 
tively; ‘and you ought to know.” 

“But there is more to be said,” he continued, after a 
pause painful to both. “I know what I have in me. No 
one knows that so wellas I. I know I shall succeed. I 
will not be kept down. I am afire with what I have to 
say in verse, and fiction, and essay. I do not ask you to 


MARTIN EDEN 271 


have faith in that, though. I do not ask you to have 
faith in me, nor in my writing. What I do ask of you 
is to love me and have faith in love. 

“A year ago I begged for two years. One of those 
years is yet to run. And I do believe, upon my honor 
and my soul, that before that year is run I shall have 
succeeded. You remember what you told me long ago, 
that I must serve my apprenticeship to writing. Well, I 
have served it. I have crammed it and telescoped it. 
With you at the end awaiting me, I have never shirked. 
Do you know, I have forgotten what it is to fall peace- 
fully asleep. A few million years ago I knew what it 
was to sleep my fill and to awake naturally from very 
glut of sleep. I am awakened always now by an alarm 
clock. If I fall asleep early or late, I set the alarm ac- 
cordingly; and this, and the putting out of the lamp, are 
my last conscious actions. 

“When I begin to feel drowsy, I change the heavy 
book I am reading for a lighter one. And when I doze 
over that, I beat my head with my knuckles in order to 
drive sleep away. Somewhere I read of a man who was 
afraid to sleep. Kipling wrote the story. ‘This man ar- 
ranged a spur so that when unconsciousness came, his 
naked body pressed against the iron teeth. Well, Ive 
done the same. I look at the time, and I resolve that not 
until midnight, or not until one o’clock, or two o’clock, or 
three o’clock, shall the spur be removed. And so it 
rowels me awake until the appointed time. That spur 
has been my bed-mate for months. I have grown so des- 
perate that five anda half hours of sleep is an extrava- 
gance. I sleep four hours now. Iam starved for sleep. 
There are times when I am light-headed from want of 
sleep, times when death, with its rest and sleep, is a posi- 
tive lure to me, times when I am haunted by Longfellow’s 
lines: — 


“¢ The sea is still and deep; 
All things within its bosom sleep; 
A single step and all is o’er, 
A plunge, a bubble, and no more.’ 


272 MARTIN EDEN 


“ Of course, this is sheer nonsense. It comes from ner- 
vousness, from an overwrought mind. But the point is: 
Why have I done this? For you. To shorten my ap- 
prenticeship. To compel Success to hasten. And my 
apprenticeship is now served. I know my equipment. 
I swear that I learn more each month than the average 
college man learns ina year. I knowit,I tell you. But 
were my need for you to understand not so desperate I 
should not tell you. It is not boasting. I measure the 
results by the books. Your brothers, to-day, are ignorant 
barbarians compared with me and the knowledge I have 
wrung from the books in the hours they were sleeping. 
Long ago I wanted to be famous. I care very little for 
fame now. What I want is you; [am more hungry for 
you than for food, or clothing, or recognition. I havea 
dream of laying my head on your breast and sleeping an 
gon or so, and the dream will come true ere another year 
is gone.”’ 

His power beat against her, wave upon wave; and in 
the moment his will opposed hers most she felt herself 
most strongly drawn toward him. The strength that had 
always poured out from him to her was now flowering in 
his impassioned voice, his flashing eyes, and the vigor of 
life and intellect surging in him. And in that moment, 
and for the moment, she was aware of a rift that showed 
in her certitude — a rift through which she caught sight 
of the real Martin Eden, splendid and invincible; and as 
animal-trainers have their moments of doubt, so she, for 
the instant, seemed to doubt her power to tame this wild 
spirit of a man. 

“And another thing,” he swept on. “You love me. 
But why do you love me? ‘The thing in me that com- 
pels me to write is the very thing that draws your love. 
You love me because I am somehow different from the 
men you have known and might have loved. I was not 
~ made for the desk and counting-house, for petty business 
squabbling and legal jangling. Make me do such things, 
make me like those other men, doing the work they do, 
breathing the air they breathe, developing the point of 


MARTIN EDEN 273 


view they have developed, and you have destroyed the 
difference, destroyed me, destroyed the thing you love. 
My desire to write is the most vital thing in me. Had I 
been a mere clod, neither would I have desired to write, 
nor would you have desired me for a husband.” 

“ But you forget,” she interrupted, the quick surface of 
her mind glimpsing a parallel. “There have been ec- 
centric inventors, starving their families while they sought 
such chimeras as perpetual motion. Doubtless their 
wives loved them, and suffered with them and for them, 
not because of but in spite of their infatuation for per- 
petual motion.” 

“True,” was the reply. “But there have been in- 
ventors who were not eccentric and who starved while 
they sought to invent practical things; and sometimes, 
it is recorded, they succeeded. Certainly I do not seek 
any impossibilities —” 

“You have called it ‘achieving the impossible,’” she 
interpolated. 

“T spoke figuratively. I seek to do what men have done 
before me —- to write and to live by my writing.” 

Her silence spurred him on. 

“To you, then, my goal is as much a chimera as per- 
petual motion?” he demanded. 

He read her answer in the pressure of her hand on his 
—the pitying mother-hand for the hurt child. And to 
her, just then, he was the hurt child, the infatuated man 
striving to achieve the impossible. 

Toward the close of their talk she warned him again of 
the antagonism of her father and mother. 

“But you love me?” he asked. 

“IT do! Ido!” she cried. 

“ And I love ‘you, not them, and nothing they do can 
hurt me.” Triumph sounded in his voice. ‘ For I have 
faith in your love, not fear of their enmity. All things 
may go astray in this world, but not love. Love cannot 
vo wrong unless it be a weakling that faints and stumbles 
by the way.” 


T 


CHAPTER XXXI 


MARTIN had encountered his sister Gertrude by chance 
on Broadway —as it proved, a most propitious yet discon- 
certing chance. Waiting on the corner for a car, she had 
seen him first, and noted the eager, hungry lines of his 
face and the desperate, worried look of his eyes. In 
truth, he was desperate and worried. He had just come 
from a fruitless interview with the pawnbroker, from 
whom he had tried to wring an additional loan on his 
wheel. The muddy fall weather having come on, Martin 
had pledged his wheel some time since and retained his 
black suit. 

“There’s the black suit,’ the pawnbroker, who knew 
his every asset, had answered. ‘“ You needn’t tell me 
you've gone and pledged it with that Jew, Lipka. Be- 
cause if you have —” 

The man had looked the threat, and Martin hastened to 
cry: — 

“No, no; I’ve got it. But I want to wear it on a 
matter of business.” 

“ All right,” the mollified usurer had replied. “ And 
I want it on a matter of business before I can let you 
have any more money. You don’t think I’m in it for my 
health ?” | 

“But it’s a forty-dollar wheel, in good condition,” 
Martin had argued. “And you’ve only let me have 
seven dollars on it. No, not even seven. Six and a 
quarter; you took the interest in advance.” 

“Tf you want some more, bring the suit,” had been the 
reply that sent Martin out of the stuffy little den, so des- 
perate at heart as to reflect it in his face and touch his 
sister to pity. 

Scarcely had they met when the Telegraph Avenue car 

274 


MARTIN EDEN 279 


came along and stopped to take on a crowd of afternoon 
shoppers. Mrs. Higginbotham divined from the grip on 
her arm as he helped her on, that he was not going to- 
follow her. She turned on the step and looked down 
upon him. His haggard face smote her to the heart 
again. 

« Ain’t you comin’ ? ” she asked 

The next moment she had descended to his side. 

“Tm walking — exercise, you know,” he explained. 

‘Then [ll go along for a few blocks,” she announced. 
‘¢Mebbe it'll do me good. I ain’t ben feelin’ any too 
spry these last few days.” 

Martin glanced at her and verified her statement in her 
general slovenly appearance, in the unhealthy fat, in the 
drooping shoulders, the tired face with the sagging lines, 
and in the heavy fall of her feet, without elasticity —a 
very caricature of the walk that belongs to a free and 
happy body. 

“You'd better stop here,” he said, though she had al- 
ready come to a halt at the first corner, “and take the 
next car.”’ 

“My goodness !—if I ain’t all tired a’ready!” she 
panted. ‘“ But I’m just as able to walk as you in them 
soles. They’re that thin they'll bu’st long before you git 
out to North Oakland.” 

“ T’ve a better pair at home,” was the answer. 

‘Come out to dinner to-morrow,” she invited ir- 
relevantly. ‘Mr. Higginbotham won’t. be there. He’s 
goin’ to San Leandro on business.” 

Martin shook his head, but he had failed to keep back 
the wolfish, hungry look that leapt into his eyes at the 
suggestion of dinner. 

“You haven’t a penny, Mart, and that’s why you’re 
walkin’. Exercise!” She tried to sniff contemptuously, 
but succeeded in producing only a sniffle. ‘* Here, lemme 
See. 

And, fumbling in her satchel, she pressed a five-dollar 
piece into hishand. ‘I guess I forgot your last birthday, 
Mart,” she mumbled lamely. 


276 MARTIN EDEN 


Martin’s hand instinctively closed on the piece of gold. 
In the same instant he knew he ought not to accept, and 
found himself struggling in the throes of indecision. 

/That bit of gold meant food, life, and ight in his body 
“and brain, power to go on writing, and—who was to 
say ?—-maybe to write something that would bring in 
many pieces of gold. Clear on his vision burned the 
manuscripts of two essays he had just completed. He 
saw them under the table on top of the heap of returned 
manuscripts for which he had no stamps, and he saw their 
titles, just as he had typed them —‘“ The High Priests of 
Mystery,” and “The Cradle of Beauty.” He had never 
submitted them anywhere. ‘They were as good as any- 
thing he had done in that line. If only he had stamps for 
them! Then the certitude of his ultimate success rose up 
in him, an able ally of hunger, and with a quick move- 
ment he slipped the coin into his pocket. 

“ [ll pay you back, Gertrude, a hundred times over,” he 
gulped out, his throat painfully contracted and in his eyes 
a swift hint of moisture. 

“ Mark my words!” he cried with abrupt positiveness. 
“ Before the year is out [ll put an even hundred of those 
little yellow-boys into your hand. I don’t ask you to 
believe me. All you have to do is wait and see.” 

Nor did she believe. Her incredulity made her uncom- 
fortable, and failing of other expedient, she said: — 

“IT know you're hungry, Mart. It’s sticking out all 
over you. Come in to meals any time. I'll send one 
of the children to tell you when Mr. Higginbotham ain’t 
to be there. An’ Mart —” 

He waited, though he knew in his secret heart what she 
Sipe about to say, so visible was her thought process to 

im. 
"“ Don’t you think it’s about time you got a job?” 

“ You don’t think I’ll win out?” he asked. 

She shook her head. 

“Nobody has faith in me, Gertrude, except myself.” 
His voice was passionately rebellious. “Ive done good 
work already, plenty of it, and sooner or later it will sell.” 


MARTIN EDEN 277 


** How do you know it is good?” 

‘“‘ Because —” He faltered as the whole vast field of lit- 
erature and the history of literature stirred in his brain and 
pointed the futility of his attempting to convey to her the 
reasons for his faith. ‘* Well, because it’s better than 
ninety-nine per cent of what is published in the maga- 
Zines. 

“T wish’t you’d listen to reason,” she answered feebly, 
but with unwavering belief in the correctness of her diag- 
nosis of what was ailing him. ‘I wish’t you’d listen to 
reason,” she repeated, ‘an’ come to dinner to-morrow.” 

After Martin had helped her on the car, he hurried to 
the post-office and invested three of the five dollars in 
stamps; and when, later in the day, on the way to the 
Morse home, he stopped in at the post-office to weigh a 
large number of long, bulky envelopes, he affixed to them 
all the stamps save three of the two-cent denomination. 

It proved a momentous night for Martin, for after din- 
ner he met Russ Brissenden. How he chanced to come 
there, whose friend he was or what acquaintance brought 
him, Martin did not know. Nor had he the curiosity to 
inquire about him of Ruth. In short, Brissenden struck 
Martin as anemic and feather-brained, and was promptly 
dismissed from his mind. An hour later he decided that 
Brissenden was a boor as well, what of the way he prowled 
about from one room to another, staring at the pictures or 
poking his nose into books and magazines he picked up 
from the table or drew from the shelves. Though astran- 
ger in the house he finally isolated himself in the midst 
of the company, huddling into a capacious Morris chair 
and reading steadily from a thin volume he had drawn 
from his pocket. As he read, he abstractedly ran his 
fingers, with a caressing movement, through his hair. 
Martin noticed him no more that evening, except once 
when he observed him chaffing with great apparent success 
with several of the young women. 

It chanced that when Martin was leaving, he overtook 
Brissenden already half down the walk to the street. 

“ Hello, is that you?” Martin said. 


278 MARTIN EDEN 


The other replied with an ungracious grunt, but swung 
alongside. Martin made no further attempt at conversa- 
tion, and for several blocks unbroken silence lay upon them. 

‘Pompous old ass!” 

The suddenness and the virulence of the exclamation 
startled Martin. He felt amused, and at the same time 
was aware of a growing dislike for the other. 

‘‘ What do you go to such a place for?” was abruptly 
flung at him after another block of silence. 

“ Why do you?” Martin countered. 

‘¢ Bless me, I don’t know,” came back. ‘At least this 
is my first indiscretion. There are twenty-four hours in 
each day, and I must spend them somehow. Come and 
have a drink.” 

“ All right,” Martin answered. 

The next moment he was nonplussed by the readiness of 
his acceptance. At home was several hours’ hack-work 
waiting for him before he went to bed, and after he went 
to bed there was a volume of Weismann waiting for him, 
to say nothing of Herbert Spencer’s Autobiography, which 
was as replete for him with romance as any thrilling novel. 
Why should he waste any time with this man he did not 
like? was his thought. And yet, it was not so much the 
man nor the drink as was it what was associated with the 
drink — the bright lights, the mirrors and dazzling array 
of glasses, the warm and glowing faces and the resonant 
hum of the voices of men. ‘That was it, it was the voices 
_. of men, optimistic men, men who breathed success and 
' spent their money for drinks like men. He was lonely, 
that was what was the matter with him; that was why he 
had snapped at the invitation as a bonita strikes at a white 
rag on ahook. Not since with Joe, at Shelly Hot Springs, 
with the one exception of the wine he took with the Portu- 
guese grocer, had Martin had a drink at a public bar. 
Mental exhaustion did not produce a craving for liquor 
such as physical exhaustion did, and he had felt no need for 
it. But just now he felt desire for the drink, or, rather, 
for the atmosphere wherein drinks were dispensed and dis- 
posed of. Such a place was the Grotto, where Brissenden 


MARTIN EDEN ehh 


and he lounged in capacious leather chairs and drank 
Scotch and soda. 

They talked. They talked about many things, and now 
Brissenden and now Martin took turn in ordering Scotch 
and soda. Martin, who was extremely strong-headed, mar- 
velled at the other’s capacity for liquor, and ever and anon 
broke off to marvel at the other’s conversation. He was 
not long in assuming that Brissenden knew everything, 
and in deciding that here was the second intellectual man 
he had met. But he noted that Brissenden had what 
Professor Caldwell lacked — namely, fire, the flashing in- 
sight and perception, the flaming uncontrol of genius. 
Living language flowed from him. His thin lips, like 
the dies of a machine, stamped out phrases that cut and 
stung; or again, pursing caressingly about the inchoate 
sound they articulated, the thin lips shaped soft and vel- 
vety things, mellow phrases of glow and glory, of haunt- 
ing beauty, reverberant of the mystery and inscrutableness 
of life; and yet again the thin lips were like a bugle, from 
which rang the crash and tumult of cosmic strife, phrases 
that sounded clear as silver, that were luminous as starry 
spaces, that epitomized the final word of science and yet 
said something more — the poet’s word, the transcendental 
truth, elusive and without words which could express, and 
which none the less found expression in the subtle and 
all but ungraspable connotations of common words. He, by 
some wonder of vision, saw beyond the farthest outpost 
of empiricism, where was no language for narration, and 
yet, by some golden miracle of speech, investing known 
words with unknown significances, he conveyed to Mar- 
tin’s consciousness messages that were incommunicable to 
ordinary souls. , 

Martin forgot his first impression of dislike. Here was 
the “Hest the books had to offer coming true. Here was 
an intelligence, a living man for him to look up to. “I 
am down in the dirt at your feet,” Martin repeated to 
himself again and again. 

“ You’ve studied biology,” he said aloud, in significant 
allusion. 


280 MARTIN EDEN 


To his surprise Brissenden shook his head. 

“ But you are stating truths that are substantiated only 
by biology,” Martin insisted, and was rewarded by a blank 
stare. ‘Your conclusions are in line with the books 
which you must have read.” 

‘Tam glad to hear it,” was the answer. “That my 
smattering of knowledge should enable me to short-cut 
my way to truth is most reassuring. As for myself, I 
never bother to find out if I am right or not. It is all 
valueless anyway. Man can never know the ultimate 
verities.”’ 

‘You are a disciple of Spencer!” Martin cried trium- 
phantly. 

‘“T haven’t read him since adolescence, and all I read 
then was his ‘ Education.’ ”’ 

‘IT wish I could gather knowledge as carelessly,” Mar- 
tin broke out half an hour later. He had been closely 
analyzing Brissenden’s mental equipment. “ You are a 
sheer dogmatist, and that’s what makes it so marvellous. 
You state dogmatically the latest facts which science has 
been able to establish only by @ posterior? reasoning. 
You jump at correct conclusions. You certainly short-cut 
with a vengeance. You feel your way with the speed of 
light, by some hyperrational process, to truth.” 

“ Yes, that was what used to bother Father Joseph, and 
Brother Dutton,” Brissenden replied. ‘Oh, no,” he 
added ; “I am not anything. It was a lucky trick of fate 
that sent me to a Catholic college for my education. 
Where did you pick up what you know?” 

And while Martin told him, he was busy studying 
Brissenden, ranging from his long, lean, aristocratic face 
and drooping shoulders to the overcoat on a neigh- 
boring chair, its pockets sagged and bulged by the 
freightage of many books. Brissenden’s face and long, 
slender hands were browned by the sun — excessively 
browned, Martin thought. This sunburn bothered Martin. 
It was patent that Brissenden was no outdoor man. 
Then how had he been ravaged by the sun? Something 
morbid and significant attached to that sunburn, was Mar- 


MARTIN EDEN 281 


tin’s thought as he returned to a study of the face, narrow, 
with high cheek-bones and cavernous hollows, and graced 
with as delicate and fine an aquiline nose as Martin had 
ever seen. ‘here was nothing remarkable about the size 
of the eyes. ‘They were neither large nor small, while 
their color was a nondescript brown; but in them smoul- 
dered a fire, or, rather, lurked an expression dual and 
strangely contradictory. Defiant, indomitable, even harsh 
to excess, they at the same time aroused pity. Martin 
found himself pitying him he knew not why, though he 
was soon to learn. 

“Oh, ?’m a lunger,” Brissenden announced, offhand, a 
little later, having already stated that he came from 
Arizona. “I’ve been down there a couple of years living 
on the climate.” 

* Aren’t you afraid to venture it up in this climate?”’ 

“ Afraid ?” 

There was no special emphasis of his repetition of 
Martin’s word. But Martin saw in that ascetic face the 
advertisement that there was nothing of which it was 
afraid. ‘The eyes had narrowed till they were eagle-like, 
and Martin almost caught his breath as he noted the 
eagle beak with its dilated nostrils, defiant, assertive, 
ageressive. Magnificent, was what he commented to 
himself, his blood thrilling at the sight. Aloud, he 
quoted : — 

“<Under the bludgeoning of Chance 
My head is bloody but unbowed.’” 


“You like Henley,” Brissenden said, his expression 
changing swiftly to large graciousness and tenderness. 
“ Of course, I couldn’t have expected anything else of 
you. Ah, Henley! A brave soul. He stands out 
among contemporary rhymesters — magazine rhymesters — 
as a gladiator stands out in the midst of a band of 
eunuchs.” 

“You don’t like the magazines,” Martin softly im- 
peached. 

“Do you?” was snarled back at him so savagely as to 
startle him. 


282 MARTIN EDEN 


“JT—TI write, or, rather, try to write, for the maga- 
zines,” Martin faltered. 

“ That’s better,” was the mollified rejoinder. “You try 
to write, but you don’t succeed. I respect and admire 
your failure. I know what you write. I can see it with 
half an eye, and there’s one ingredient in it that shuts it 
out of the magazines. It’s guts, and magazines have no 
use for that particular commodity. What they want is 
wish-wash and slush, and God knows they get it, but not 
from you.” 

“T’m not above hack-work,” Martin contended. 

“On the contrary —” Brissenden paused and ran an 
insolent eye over Martin’s objective poverty, passing from 
the well-worn tie and the saw-edged collar to the shiny 
sleeves of the coat and on to the slight fray of one cuff, 
winding up and dwelling upon Martin’s sunken cheeks. 
“On the contrary, hack-work is above you, so far above 
you that you can never hope to rise to it. Why, man, 
I could insult you by asking you to have something to 
eat.” 

Martin felt the heat in his face of the involuntary 
blood, and Brissenden laughed triumphantly. 

‘ A full man is not insulted by such an invitation,” he 
concluded. 

“You are a devil,” Martin cried irritably. 

“ Anyway, I didn’t ask you.” 

“ You didn’t dare.” 

“Oh, I don’t know about that. I invite you now.” 

Brissenden half rose from his chair as he spoke, as if 
with the intention of departing to the restaurant forth- 
with. 

Martin’s fists were tight-clenched, and his blood was 
drumming in his temples. 

“Bosco! He eats ’em alive! Eats ’em alive!” Bris- 
senden exclaimed, imitating the spieler of a locally famous 
snake-eater. 

“TJ could certainly eat you alive,” Martin said, in turn 
ries insolent eyes over the other’s disease-ravaged 

rame. 


MARTIN EDEN 2% r 


“ Only ’'m not worthy of it?” 

“On the contrary,” Martin considered, “because the 
incident is not worthy.” He broke into a laugh, hearty 
and wholesome. “I confess you made a fool of me, Bris- 
senden. ‘That I am hungry and you are aware of it are 
only ordinary phenomena, and there’s no disgrace. You 
see, I laugh at the. conventionaL.Jittle. moxalities of. the 
herd; then you drift by, say a sharp, true word, and im- 
mediately I am the slave of the same little moralities.” 

‘“ You were insulted,” Brissenden affirmed. 

“YT certainly was, a moment ago. The prejudice of 
early youth, you know. I learned such things then, and 
they cheapen what I have since learned. ‘They are the 
skeletons in my particular closet.” 

“ But you've got the door shut on them now?” 

“ T certainly have.” 

“Cheese tae 

Se SUres’ 

“ Then let’s go and get something to eat.” 

“Pll go you,” Martin answered, attempting to pay for 
the current Scotch and soda with the last change from 
his two dollars and seeing the waiter bullied by Brissen- 
den into putting that change back on the table. 

Martin pocketed it with a grimace, and felt for a 
moment the kindly weight of Brissenden’s hand upon 
his shoulder. 


28 i 


CHAPTER XXXII 


PROMPTLY. the next afternoon, Maria was excited by 
Martin’s second visitor. But she did not lose her head 
this time, for she seated Brissenden in her parlor’s grandeur 
of respectability. 

“Hope you don’t mind my coming?” Brissenden 
began. 

**No, no, not at all,” Martin answered, shaking hands 
and waving him to the solitary chair, himself taking to 
the bed. ‘But how did you know where I lived?” 

“Called up the Morses. Miss Morse answered the 
*phone. And here lam.” He tugged at his coat pocket 
and flung a thin volume on the table. ‘*'There’s a book, 
by a poet. Read it and keep it.” And then, in reply to 
Martin’s protest: “ What have I to do with books? I 
had another hemorrhage this morning. Got any whiskey ? 
No, of course not. Wait a minute.” 

He was off and away. Martin watched his long figure 
go down the outside steps, and, on turning to close the 
gate, noted with a pang the shoulders, which had once 
been broad, drawn in now over the collapsed ruin of the 
chest. Martin got two tumblers, and fell to reading the 
book of verse, Henry Vaughn Marlow’s latest collection. 

‘No Scotch,” Brissenden announced on his return. 
“ The beggar sells nothing but American whiskey. But 
here’s a quart of it.” 

“Til send one of the youngsters for lemons, and we’ll 
make a toddy,” Martin offered. 

. “ I wonder what a book like that will earn Marlow?” 
he went on, holding up the volume in question. 

‘“¢ Possibly fifty dollars,” came the answer. ‘ Though 
he’s lucky if he pulls even on it, or if he can inveigle a 
publisher to risk bringing it out.” 

“Then one can’t make a living out of poetry ?” 

284 


MARTIN EDEN 285 


Martin’s tone and face alike showed his dejection. 

“ Certainly not. What fool expectsto? Out of rhym- 
ing, yes. There’s Bruce, and Virginia Spring, and Sedg- 
wick. They do very nicely. But poetry —do you know 
how Vaughn Marlow makes his living ?— teaching in a 
boys’ cramming-joint down in Pennsylvania, and of all 
private little hells such a billet is the limit. I wouldn’t 
trade places with him if he had fifty years of life before 
him. And yet his work stands out from the ruck of the 
contemporary versifiers as a balas ruby among carrots. 
And the reviews he gets! Damn them, all of them, the 
crass manikins! ” 

“Too much is written by the men who can’t write about 
the men who do write,” Martin concurred. “ Why, I was 
appalled at the quantities of rubbish written about Ste- 
venson and his work.” 

“Ghouls and harpies!” Brissenden snapped out with . 
clicking teeth. “ Yes, I know the spawn — complacently 
pecking at him for his Father Damien letter, analyzing 
him, weighing him —” 

‘ Measuring him by the yardstick of their own miser- 
able egos,” Martin broke in. 

“ Yes, that’s it, a good phrase, — mouthing and beslim- 
ing the True, and Beautiful, and Good, and finally patting 
him on the back and saying, ‘Good dog, Fido.’ Faugh! 
‘The little chattering daws of men,’ Richard Realf called 
them the night he died.” — 

“ Pecking at star-dust,” Martin took up the strain 
warmly; “at the meteoric flight of the master-men. I 
once wrote a squib on them — the critics, or the reviewers, 
rather.” 

*“ Let’s see it,” Brissenden begged eagerly. 

So Martin unearthed a carbon copy of “ Star-dust,”’ and 
during the reading of it Brissenden chuckled, rubbed his 
hands, and forgot to sip his toddy. 

“Strikes me you’re a bit of star-dust yourself, flung into 
a world of cowled gnomes who cannot see,” was his com- 
ment at the end of it. ‘* Of course it was snapped up by 
the first magazine ? ” | 


¥ 


¢ 


ZOO ia MARTIN EDEN 


é 
( Martin ran over the pages of his manuscript book. 

“It has been refused by twenty-seven of them.” 

Brissenden essayed a long and hearty laugh, but broke 
down in a fit of coughing. 

‘Say, you needn’t tell me you haven’t tackled poetry,” 
he gasped. “Let me see some of it.” 

‘“ Don’t read it now,” Martin pleaded. “I want to 
talk with you. Ill make up a bundle and you can take 
it home.” 

Brissenden departed with the “ Love-cycle,” and “ The 
Peri and the Pearl,” returning next day to greet Martin 
with : — 

“T want more.” 

Not only did he assure Martin that he was a poet, but 
Martin learned that Brissenden also was one. He was 
swept off his feet by the other’s work, and astounded that 
no attempt had been made to publish it. 

“A plague on all their houses!” was Brissenden’s 
answer to Martin’s volunteering to market his work for 
him. ‘ Love Beauty for its own sake,” was his counsel, 
‘and leave the magazines alone. Back to your ships and 
your sea — that’s my advice to you, Martin Eden. What 


fdo you want in these sick and rotten cities of men? You 


are cutting your throat every day you waste in them try- 
ing to prostitute beauty to the needs of magazinedom. 
What was it you quoted me the other day ?— Oh, yes, 
‘Man, the latest of the ephemera.’ Well, what do you, 
the latest of the ephemera, want with fame? If you got 
it, it would be poison to you. You are too simple, too 
elemental, and too rational, by my faith, to prosper on 
such pap. JI hope you never do sella line to the maga- 
zines. Beauty is the only master to serve. Serve her 
and damn the multitude! Success! What in hell’s suc- 


cess if it isn’t right there in your Stevenson sonnet, which 


outranks Henley’s ‘ Apparition,’ in that ‘ Love-cycle,’ in 
those sea-poems ? 
“Jt is not in what you succeed in doing that you get 


\ your joy, but in the doing of it. You can’t tell me. I 


know it. You know it. Beauty hurts you. It is an 


MARTIN EDEN . 287 


everlasting pain in you, a wound that does not heal, a 
knife of flame. Why should you palter with magazines ? 
Let beauty be your end. Why should you mint beauty 
into gold? Anyway, you can’t; so there’s no use in my 
getting excited over it. You can read the magazines for 
a thousand years and you won’t find the value of one 
line of Keats. Leave fame and coin alone, sign away on 
a ship to-morrow, and go back to your sea.” 

“ Not for fame, but for love,’ Martin laughed. “Love 
seems to have no place in your Cosmos; in mine, Beauty 
is the handmaiden of Love.” 

Brissenden looked at him pityingly and admiringly. 
“You are so young, Martin boy, so young. You will 
flutter high, but your wings are of the finest gauze, dusted 
with the fairest pigments. Do not scorch them. But 
of course you have scorched them already. It required 
some glorified petticoat to account for that ‘ Love-cycle,’ 
and that’s the shame of it.” 

“It glorifies love as well as the petticoat,” Martin 
laughed. 

“The philosophy of madness,” was the retort. ‘So 
have I assured myself when wandering in hasheesh 


99 


dreams. But beware. These bourgeois cities will kill ** 


you. Look at that den of traitors where I met you. 
Dry rot is no name for it. One can’t keep his sanity 
in such an atmosphere. It’s degrading. ‘There’s not one 
of them who is not degrading, man and woman, all of them 
animated stomachs guided by the high intellectual and 
artistic impulses of clams — ” 

He broke off suddenly and regarded Martin. Then, 
with a flash of divination, he saw the situation. ‘The ex- 
pression on his face turned to wondering horror. 

« And you wrote that tremendous ‘ Love-cycle’ to her 
—that pale, shrivelled, female thing !” 

The next instant Martin’s right hand had shot to a 
throttling clutch on his throat, and he was being shaken 
till his teeth rattled. But Martin, looking into his eyes, 
saw no fear there,—naught but a curious and mocking 
devil. Martin remembered himself, and flung Brissen- 


288 MARTIN EDEN 


den, by the neck, sidelong upon the bed, at the same 
moment releasing his hold. 

Brissenden panted and gasped painfully for a moment, 
then began to chuckle. 

“You had made me eternally your debtor had you 
shaken out the flame,” he said. 

‘My nerves are on a hair-trigger these days,” Martin 
apologized. ‘“ Hope I didn’t hurt you. Here, let me 
mix a fresh toddy.” 

“Ah, you young Greek!” Brissenden went on. “I 
wonder if you take just pride in that body of yours. You 
are devilish strong. You are a young panther, a lion 
cub. Well, well, it is you who must pay for that 
strength.” 

“What do you mean?” Martin asked curiously, pass- 
ing hima glass. ‘ Here, down this and be good.” 

‘“¢ Because —” Brissenden sipped his toddy and smiled 
appreciation of it. ‘Because of the women. They will 
worry you until you die, as they have already worried 
you, or else I was born yesterday. Now there’s no use in 
your choking me; [’m going to have my say. This is 
undoubtedly your calf love ; but for Beauty’s sake show 
better taste next time. What under heaven do you want 
with a daughter of the bourgeoisie ? Leave them alone. 
Pick out some great, wanton flame of a woman, who 
laughs at life and jeers at death and loves one while 
she may. ‘There are such women, and they will love you 
just as readily as any pusillanimous product of bourgeois- 
sheltered life.” 

“ Pusillanimous ?” Martin protested. 

“ Just so, pusillanimous; prattling out little moralities 
that have been prattled into them, and afraid to live life. 
They will love you, Martin, but they will love their little 
moralities more. What you want is the magnificent 
abandon of life, the great free souls, the blazing butterflies 
and not the little gray moths. Oh, you will grow tired of 
them, too, of all the female things, if you are unlucky 
enough to live. But you won’tlive. You won’t go back 
to your ships and sea; therefore, you'll hang around these 


MARTIN EDEN 289 


pest-holes of cities until your bones are rotten, and then 
you'll die.” 

“ You can lecture me, but you can’t make me talk back,” 
Martin said. “After all, you have but the wisdom of 
your temperament, and the wisdom of my temperament is 
just as unimpeachable as yours.” 

They disagreed about love, and the magazines, and many 
things, but they liked each other, and on Martin’s part it was 
no less than a profound liking. Day after day they were 
together, if for no more than the hour Brissenden spent 
in Martin’s stuffy room. Brissenden never arrived with- 
out his quart of whiskey, and when they dined together 
down-town, he drank Scotch and soda throughout the 
meal. He invariably paid the way for both, and it was 
through him that Martin learned the refinements of food, 
drank his first champagne, and made acquaintance with 
Rhenish wines. 

But Brissenden was always an enigma. With the face 
of an ascetic, he was, in all the failing blood of him, a 
frank voluptuary. He was unafraid to die, bitter and 
cynical of all the ways of living; and yet, dying, he loved 
life, to the last atom of it. He was possessed by a mad- 
ness to live, to thrill, “to squirm my little space in the 
cosmic dust whence I came,” as he phrased it once him- 
self. He had tampered with drugs and done many 
strange things in quest of new thrills, new sensations. 
As he told Martin, he had once gone three days without 
water, had done so voluntarily, in order to experi- 
ence the exquisite delight of such a thirst assuaged. 
Who or what he was, Martin never learned. He was a 
man without a past, whose future was the imminent grave 
and whose present was a bitter fever of living. 

\ 


CHAPTER XXXIIT 


MARTIN was steadily losing his battle. Economize as he 
would, the earnings from hack-work did not balance ex- 
penses. Thankgiving found him with his black suit in 
pawn and unable to accept the Morses’ invitation to din- 
ner. Ruth was not made happy by his reason for not 
coming, and the corresponding effect on him was one of 
desperation. He told her that he would come, after all; 
that he would go over to San Francisco, to the Transcon- 
tinental office, collect the five dollars due him, and with it 
redeem his suit of clothes. 

In the morning he borrowed ten cents from Maria. He 
would have borrowed it, by preference, from Brissenden, 
but that erratic individual had disappeared. ‘T'wo weeks 
had passed since Martin had seen him, and he vainly cud- 
gelled his brains for some cause of offence. The ten cents 
carried Martin across the ferry to San Francisco, and as 
he walked up Market Street he speculated upon his pre- 
dicament in case he failed to collect the money. ‘There 
would then be no way for him to return to Oakland, and 
he knew no one in San Francisco from whom to borrow 
another ten cents. 

The door to the Transcontinental office was ajar, and 
Martin, in the act of opening it, was brought to a sudden 
pause by a loud voice from within, which exclaimed : — 

“ But that is not the question, Mr. Ford.” (Ford, Mar- 
tin knew, from his correspondence, to be the editor’s name. ) 
“The question is, are you prepared to pay ? —cash, and 
cash down, I mean? I am not interested in the prospects 
of the Transcontinental and what you expect to make it 
next year. What I want is to be paid for what I do. 
And I tell you, right now, the Christmas Transcontinental 
don’t go to press till I have the money in my hand. Good 
day. When you get the money, come and see me.” 

290 


MARTIN EDEN 291 


The door jerked open, and the man flung past Martin 
with an angry countenance and went down the corridor, 
muttering curses and clenching his fists. . Martin decided 
not to enter immediately, and lingered in the hallways for 
a quarter of an hour. ‘Then he shoved the door open and 
walked in. It was a new experience, the first time he had 
been inside an editorial office. Cards evidently were not 
necessary in that office, for the boy carried word to an in- 
ner room that there was a man who wanted to see Mr. 
Ford. Returning, the boy beckoned him from halfway 
across the room and led him to the private office, the 
editorial sanctum. Martin’s first impression was of the 
disorder and cluttered confusion of the room. Next he 
noticed a bewhiskered, youthful-looking man, sitting at a 
roll-top desk, who regarded him curiously. Martin mar- 
velled at the calm repose of his face. It was evident that 
the squabble with the printer had not affected his equa- 
nimity. 

“J —T am Martin Eden,” Martin began the conversa- 
tion. (“And I want my five dollars,” was what he would 
have liked to say.) 

But this was his first editor, and under the circumstances 
he did not desire to scare him too abruptly. To his sur- 
prise, Mr. Ford leaped into the air with a “ You don’t say 
so!’’ and the next moment, with both hands, was shaking 
Martin’s hand effusively. 

“Can’t say how glad Iam to see you, Mr. Eden. Often 
wondered what you were like.” 

Here he held Martin off at arm’s length and ran his 
beaming eyes over Martin’s second-best suit, which was 
also his worst suit, and which was ragged and past repair, 
though the trousers showed the careful crease he had put 
in with Maria’s‘flat-irons. 

“IT confess, though, I conceived you to be a much older 
man than you are. Your story, you know, showed such 
breadth, and vigor, such maturity and depth of thought. 
A masterpiece, that story — I knew it when I had read the 
first half-dozen lines. Let me tell you how I first read it. 
But no; first let me introduce you to the staff.” 


292 MARTIN EDEN 


Still talking, Mr. Ford led him into the general office, 
where he introduced him to the associate editor, Mr. White, 
a slender, frail little man whose hand seemed strangely 
. cold, as if he were suffering from a chill, and whose whisk- 
ers were sparse and silky. 

“ And Mr. Ends, Mr. Eden. Mr. Ends is our business 
manager, you know.” 

Martin found himself shaking hands with a cranky-eyed, 
bald-headed man, whose face looked youthful enough from 
what little could be seen of it, for most of it was covered 
by a snow-white beard, carefully trimmed — by his wife, 
who did it on Sundays, at which times she also shaved the 
back of his neck. 

The three men surrounded Martin, all talking admiringly 
and at once, until it seemed to him that they were talking 
against time for a wager. 

“We often wondered why you didn’t call,” Mr. White 
was saying. 

“‘T didn’t have the carfare, and I live across the Bay,” 
Martin answered bluntly, with the idea of showing them 
his imperative need for the money. 

Surely, he thought to himself, my glad rags in them- 
selves are eloquent advertisement of my need. ‘Time and 
again, whenever opportunity offered, he hinted about the 
purpose of his business. But his admirers’ ears were deaf. 
They sang his praises, told him what they had thought of. 
his story at first sight, what they subsequently thought, 
what their wives and families thought; but not one hint 
did they breathe of intention to pay him for it. 

“Did I tell you how I first read your story?” Mr. Ford 
said. “Of course I didn’t. I was coming west from New 
York, and when the train stopped at Ogden, the train-boy 
on the new run brought aboard the current number of the 
Transcontinental.” 

My God! Martin thought; you can travel in a Pullman 
while I starve for the paltry five dollars youowe me. A 
wave of anger rushed over him. The wrong done him by 
the Transcontinental loomed colossal, for strong upon 
him were all the dreary months of vain yearning, of hunger 


MARTIN EDEN 293 


and privation, and his present hunger awoke and gnawed 
at him, reminding him that he had eaten nothing since the 
day before, and little enoughthen. For the moment he 
saw red. ‘hese creatures were not even robbers. They 
were sneak-thieves. By lies and broken promises they had 
tricked him out of his story. Well, he would show them. 
And a great resolve surged into his will to the effect that 
he would not leave the office until he got his money. He 
remembered, if he did not get it, that there was no way 
for him to go back to Oakland. He controlled himself 
with an effort, but not before the wolfish expression of his 
face had awed and perturbed them. 

They became more voluble thanever. Mr. Ford started 
anew to tell how he had first read “'The Ring of Bells,” 
and Mr. Ends at the same time was striving to repeat his 
niece’s appreciation of “The Ring of Bells,” said niece 
being a school-teacher in Alameda. 

“ll tell you what I came for,” Martin said finally. 
“To be paid for that story all of you lke so well. Five 
dollars, I believe, is what you promised me would be paid 
on publication.” 

Mr. Ford, with an expression on his mobile features of 
immediate and happy acquiescence, started to reach for his 
pocket, then turned suddenly to Mr. Ends, and said that 
he had left his money home. That Mr. Ends resented 
this, was patent; and Martin saw the twitch of his arm as 
if to protect his trousers pocket. Martin knew that the 
money was there. 

*T am sorry,” said Mr. Ends, “but I paid the printer 
not an hour ago, and he took my ready change. It was 
careless of me to be so short; but the bill was not yet 
due, and the printer’s request, as a favor, to make an im- 
mediate advance, was quite unexpected.” 

Both men looked expectantly at Mr. White, but that 
gentleman laughed and shrugged his shoulders. His con- 
science was clean at any rate. He had come into the 
Transcontinental to learn magazine-literature, instead 
of which he had principally learned finance. The Trans- 
continental owed him four months’ salary, and he knew 


294 MARTIN EDEN 


that the printer must be appeased before the associate 
editor. 

“Tt’s rather absurd, Mr. Eden, to have caught us in 
this shape,’ Mr. Ford preambled airily. ‘All careless- 
ness, I assure you. But Illtell you what we’lldo. We'll 
mail you a check the first thing in the morning. You 
have Mr. Eden’s address, haven’t you, Mr. Ends ?” 

Yes, Mr. Ends had the address, and the check would be 
mailed the first thing in the morning. Martin’s knowl- 
edge of banks and checks was hazy, but he could see no 
reason why they should not give him the check on this 
day just as well as on the next. 

«Then it is understood, Mr. Eden, that we'll mail you 
the check to-morrow?” Mr. Ford said. 

“T need the money to-day,” Martin answered stolidly. 

“The unfortunate circumstances —if you had chanced 
here any other day,” Mr. Ford began suavely, only to be 
interrupted by Mr. Ends, whose cranky eyes justified them- 
selves in his shortness of temper. 

‘Mr. Ford has already explained the situation,” he said 
with asperity. “And so have I. The check will be 
mailed — 

“T also have peained, ” Martin broke 1 in, “and I have 
explained that I want the money to-day.” 

He had felt his pulse quicken a trifle at the business 
manager’s brusqueness, and upon him he kept an alert 
eye, for it was in that gentleman’s trousers pocket that 
he divined the Zranscontinental’s ready cash was repos- 
ing. 

“Tt is too bad—” Mr. Ford began. 

But at that moment, with an impatient movement, Mr. 
Ends turned as if about to leave the room. At the same 
instant Martin sprang for him, clutching him by the throat 
with one hand in such fashion that Mr. Ends’ snow-white 
beard, still maintaining its immaculate trimness, pointed 
ceilingward at an angle of forty-five degrees. ‘To the hor- 
ror of Mr. White and Mr. Ford, they saw their business 
manager shaken like an Astrakhan rug. 

“Dig up, you venerable discourager of rising young 


MARTIN EDEN 295 


talent !” Martin exhorted. “ Dig up, or I’ll shake it out 
of you, even if it’s all in nickels.” Then, to the two af- 
frighted onlookers: “ Keep away! If you interfere, some- 
body’s liable to get hurt.” 

Mr. Ends was choking, and it was not until the grip on 
his throat was eased that he was able to signify his ac- 
quiescence in the digging-up programme. All together, 
after repeated digs, his trousers pocket yielded four dol- 
lars and fifteen cents. 

‘Inside out with it,” Martin commanded. 

An additional ten cents fell out. Martin counted the 
result of his raid a second time to make sure. 

“You next!” he shouted at Mr. Ford. “I want sey- 
enty-five cents more.” 

Mr. Ford did not wait, but ransacked his pockets, with 
the result of sixty cents. © 

“Sure that is all?” Martin demanded menacingly, 
possessing himself of it. “ What have you got in your 
vest pockets ? ” 

In token of his good faith, Mr. Ford turned two of his 
pockets inside out. A strip of cardboard fell to the floor 
from one of them. He recovered it and was in the act of 
returning it, when Martin cried: — 

“ What’s that ? — A ferry ticket? Here, give it to me. 
It’s worth ten cents. Tl credit you with it. I’ve now 
got four dollars and ninety-five cents, including the ticket. 
Five cents is still due me.” 

He looked fiercely at Mr. White, and found that fragile 
creature in the act of handing him a nickel. 

“Thank you,” Martin said, addressing them collectively. 
“TJ wish you a good day.” 

‘Robber !” Mr. Ends snarled after him. 

“¢ Sneak-thief!” Martin retorted, slamming the door as 
he passed out. 

Martin was elated—so elated that when he recollected 


that The Hornet owed him fifteen dollars for “The Peri “ 


and the Pearl,” he decided forthwith to go and collect it. 
But The Hornet was run by a set of clean-shaven, 
strapping young men, frank buccaneers who robbed 


296 MARTIN EDEN 


everything and everybody, not excepting one another. 
After some breakage of the office furniture, the editor 
(an ex-college athlete), ably assisted by the business man- 
ager, an advertising agent, and the porter, succeeded in 
removing Martin from the office and in accelerating, by 
initial impulse, his descent of the first flight of stairs. 

‘Come again, Mr. Eden; glad to see you any time,” 
they laughed down at him from the landing above. 

Martin grinned as he picked himself up. 

“Phew!” he murmured back. “ The Transcontinental 
crowd were nanny-goats, but you fellows are a lot of 
prize-fighters.” 

More laughter greeted this. 

“TI must say, Mr. Eden,” the editor of The Hornet called 
down, “that for a poet you can gosome yourself. Where 
did you learn that right cross — if I may ask?” 

“Where you learned that half-Nelson,” Martin an- 
swered. ‘Anyway, you're going to have a black eye.’ 

“I hope your neck doesn’t stiffen up,” the editor wished 
solicitously. “ What do you say we all go out and have 
a drink on it—not the neck, of course, but the little 
rough-house ?”’ 

“T’ll go you if I lose,” Martin accepted. 

And robbers and robbed drank together, amicably 
agreeing that the battle was to the strong, and that the 
fifteen dollars for “The Peri and the Pearl” belonged by 
right to The Hornet’s editorial staff. 


CHAPTER XXXIV 


ARTHUR remained at the gate while Ruth climbed 
Maria’s front steps. She heard the rapid click of the 
type-writer, and when Martin let her in, found him on the 
last page of a manuscript. She had come to make certain 
whether or not he would be at their table for Thanks- 
giving dinner; but before she could broach the subject 
Martin plunged into the one with which he was full. 

‘Here, let me read you this,” he cried, separating the 
carbon copies and running the pages of manuscript into 
shape. ‘It’s my latest, and different from anything I’ve 
done. It is soaltogether different that I am almost afraid 
of it, and yet I’ve a sneaking idea it is good. You be 
judge. It’s an Hawaiian story. I’ve called it ‘ Wiki- 
ita it its 

His face was bright with the creative glow, though she 
shivered in the cold room and had been struck by the 
coldness of his hands at greeting. She listened closely 
while he read, and though he from time to time had seen 
only disapprobation in her face, at the close he asked : — 

“ Hrankly, what do you think of it?” 

**!— I don’t know,” she answered. ‘“ Will it—do you 
think it will sell?” 

“ T’m afraid not,” was the confession. “It’s too strong 
for the magazines. But it’s true, on my word it’s true.” 

‘But why do you persist in writing such things when 
you know they‘ won’t sell?” she went on inexorably.\ 
«The reason for your writing is to make a living, isn’t it?” 

“Yes, that’s right; but the miserable story got away 
with me. I couldn’t help writing it. It demanded to be 
written.” 

“ But that character, that Wiki- Wiki, why do you make 
him talk so roughly? Surely it will offend your readers, 

297 


298 MARTIN EDEN 


and surely that is why the editors are justified in refusing 
your work.” 

“¢ Because the real Wiki-Wiki would have talked that 
way.” 

“ But it is not good taste.” 

“Tt is life,” hereplied bluntly. “Itis real. It is true. 
And I must write life as I see it.” 

She made no answer, and for an awkward moment they 
sat silent. It was because he loved her that he did not 
quite understand her, and she could not understand him 
because he was so large that he bulked beyond her hori- 
zon. 

“Well, I’ve collected from the Transcontinental,” he 
said in an effort to shift the conversation to a more com- 
fortable subject. The picture of the bewhiskered trio, as 
he had last seen them, mulcted of four dollars and ninety 
cents and a ferry ticket, made him chuckle. 

“Then you'll come!” she cried joyously. “ That was 
what I came to find out.” 

“Come?” he muttered absently. ‘ Where?” 

“ Why, to dinner to-morrow. You know you said you’d 
recover your suit if you got that money.” 

“J forgot all about it,” he said humbly. “You see, 
this morning the poundman got Maria’s two cows and the 
baby calf, and—vwell, it happened that Maria didn’t 
have any money, and so I had to recover her cows for her. 
That’s where the Transcontinental fiver went— ‘The 
Ring of Bells’ went into the poundman’s pocket.” 

“Then you won’t come?” 

He looked down at his clothing. 

SSicCan tea 

Tears of disappointment and reproach glistened in her 
blue eyes, but she said nothing. 

“Next Thanksgiving you'll have dinner with me in 
Delmonico’s,” he said cheerily; ‘or in London, or Paris, 
or anywhere you wish. I know it.” 

“JT saw in the paper a few days ago,” she announced 
abruptly, ‘that there had been several local appointments 
to the Railway Mail. You passed first, didn’t you? ” 


? 


MARTIN EDEN 299 


He was compelled to admit that the call had come for 
him, but that he had declined it. “I was so sure —I am 
so sure — of myself,” he concluded. “A year from now 
Pll be earning more than a dozen men in the Railway 
Mail. You wait and see.” 

‘““Oh,” was all she said, when he finished. She stood 
up, pulling at her gloves. “I must go, Martin. Arthur 
is waiting for me.” 

He took her in his arms and kissed her, but she proved 
a passive sweetheart. ‘There was no tenseness in her body, 
her arms did not goaround him, and her lips met his with- 
out their wonted pressure. 

She was angry with him, he concluded, as he returned 
from the gate. But why? It was unfortunate that the 
poundman had gobbled Maria’s cows. But it was only 
a stroke of fate. Nobody could be blamed for it. Nor 
did it enter his head that he could have done aught other- 
wise than what he had done. Well, yes, he was to blame 
a little, was his next thought, for having refused the call to 
the Railway Mail. And she had not liked “ Wiki- Wiki.” 

He turned at the head of the steps to meet the letter- 
carrier on his afternoon round. ‘The ever recurrent fever 
of expectancy assailed Martin as he took the bundle of 
long envelopes. One was not long. It was short and 
thin, and outside was printed the address of The New 
York Outview. He paused in the act of tearing the 
envelope open. It could not be an acceptance. He 
had no manuscripts with that publication. Perhaps — 
his heart almost stood still at the wild thought — perhaps 
they were ordering an article from him; but the next in- 
stant he dismissed the surmise as hopelessly impossible. 

It was a short, formal letter, signed by the office editor, 
merely informing him that an anonymous letter which 
they had received was enclosed, and that he could rest 
assured the Outview’s staff never under any circum- 
stances gave consideration to anonymous correspondence. 

The enclosed letter Martin found to be crudely printed 
by hand. It was a hotchpotch of illiterate abuse of 
Martin, and of assertion that the ‘so-called Martin Eden” 


300 MARTIN EDEN 


who was selling stories to magazines was no writer at all, 
and that in reality he was stealing stories from old maga- 
zines, typing them, and sending them out as his own. 
The envelope was postmarked “San Leandro.” Martin 
did not require a second thought to discover the author. 
Higginbotham’s grammar, Higginbotham’s colloquialisms, 
Higginbotham’s mental quirks and processes, were ap- 
parent throughout. Martin saw in every line, not the 
fine Italian hand, but the coarse grocer’s fist, of his brother- 
in-law. 

But why? he vainly questioned. What injury had he 
done Bernard Higginbotham? ‘The thing was so unreason- 
able, so wanton. ‘There was no explaining it. In the 
course of the week a dozen similar letters were forwarded 
to Martin by the editors of various Eastern magazines. 
The editors were behaving handsomely, Martin concluded. 
He was wholly unknown to them, yet some of them had 
even been sympathetic. It was evident that they detested 
anonymity. He saw that the malicious attempt to hurt 
him had failed. In fact, if anything came of it, it was 
bound to be good, for at least his name had been called to 
the attention of a number of editors. Sometime, perhaps, 
reading a submitted manuscript of his, they might re- 
member him as the fellow about whom they had received 
an anonymous letter. And who was to say that such 
a remembrance might not sway the balance of their judg- 
ment just a trifle in his favor ? 

It was about this time that Martin took a great slump 
in Maria’s estimation. He found her in the kitchen one 
morning, groaning with pain, tears of weakness running 
down her cheeks, vainly endeavoring to put through a 
large ironing. He promptly diagnosed her affliction as La 
Grippe, dosed her with hot whiskey (the remnants in the 
bottles for which Brissenden was responsible), and ordered 
her to bed. But Maria was refractory. The ironing had 
to be done, she protested, and delivered that night, or else 
there would be no food on the morrow for the seven small 
and hungry Silvas. 

To her astonishment (and it was something that she 


MARTIN EDEN. 301 


never ceased from relating to her dying day), she saw 
Martin Eden seize an iron from the stove and throw a 
fancy shirt-waist on the ironing-board. It was Kate Flan- 
agan’s best Sunday waist, than whom there was no more 
exacting and fastidiously dressed woman in Maria’s world. 
Also, Miss Flanagan had sent special instruction that said 
waist must be delivered by that night. As every one 
knew, she was keeping company with John Collins, the 
blacksmith, and, as Maria knew privily, Miss Flanagan 
and Mr. Collins were going next day to Golden Gate 
Park. Vain was Maria’s attempt to rescue the garment. 
Martin guided her tottering footsteps to a chair, from 
where she watched him with bulging eyes. In a quarter 
of the time it would have taken her she saw the shirt- 
waist safely ironed, and ironed as well as she could have 
done it, as Martin made her grant. 

“TY could work faster,” he explained, “if your irons were 
only hotter.” 

To her, the irons he swung were much hotter than she 
ever dared to use. 

“Your sprinkling is all wrong,” he complained next. 
*¢ Here, let me teach you how to sprinkle. Pressure is 
what’s wanted. Sprinkle under pressure if you want to 
iron fast.” 

He procured a packing-case from the woodpile in the 
cellar, fitted a cover to it, and raided the scrap-iron the 
Silva tribe was collecting for the juankman. With fresh- 
sprinkled garments in the box, covered with the board and 
pressed by the iron, the device was complete and in oper- 
ation. 

“Now you watch me, Maria,” he said, stripping off to 
his undershirt ‘and gripping an iron that was what he 
called “really hot.” 

** An’ when he feenish da iron’ he washa da wools,”’ as 
she described it afterward. ‘He say, ‘ Maria, you are da 
ereata fool.. I showa you how to washa da wools,’ an’ he 
showa me, too. Ten minutes he maka da machine — one 
barrel, one wheel-hub, two poles, justa like dat.” 

Martin had learned the contrivance from Joe at the 


302 MARTIN EDEN 


Shelly Hot Springs. The old wheel-hub, fixed on the 
end of the upright pole, constituted the plunger. Making 
this, in turn, fast to the spring-pole attached to the kitchen 
rafters, so that the hub played upon the woollens in the 
barrel, he was able, with one hand, thoroughly to pound 
them. 

‘No more Maria washa da wools,” her story always 
ended. “I maka da kids worka da pole an’ da hub an’ da 
barrel. Him da smarta man, Mister Eden.” 

Nevertheless, by his masterly operation and improve- 
ment of her kitchen-laundry, he fell an immense distance 
in her regard. The glamour of romance with which her 
imagination had invested him faded away in the cold light 
of fact that he was an ex-laundryman. All his books, and 
his grand friends who visited him in carriages or with 
countless bottles of whiskey, went for naught. He was, 
after all, a mere workingman, a member of her own class 
and caste. He was more human and approachable, but 
he was no longer mystery. 

Martin’s alienation from his family continued. Follow- 
ing upon Mr. Higginbotham’s unprovoked attack, Mr. 
Hermann von Schmidt showed his hand. The fortunate 
sale of several storiettes, some humorous verse, and a few 
jokes gave Martin a temporary splurge of prosperity. Not 
only did he partially pay up his bills, but he had sufficient 
balance left to redeem his black suit and wheel. The lat- 
ter, by virtue of a twisted crank-hanger, required repair- 
ing, and, as a matter of friendliness with his future 
brother-in-law, he sent it to Von Schmidt’s shop. 

The afternoon of the same day Martin was pleased by 
the wheel being delivered by a small boy. Von Schmidt 
was also inclined to be friendly, was Martin’s conclusion 
from this unusual favor. Repaired wheels usually had to 
be called for. But when he examined the wheel, he discoy- 
ered no repairs had been made. A little later in the day 
he telephoned his sister’s betrothed, and learned that that 
person didn’t want anything to do with him in “any 
shape, manner, or form.” 

“ Hermann von Schmidt,” Martin answered cheerfully, 


MARTIN EDEN 303 


* T’ve a good mind to come over and punch that Dutch 
nose of yours.” “ 

* You come to my shop,” came the reply, “ an’ I’ll send 
for the police. An’ Ill put you through, too. Oh, I 
know you, but you can’t make no rough-house with me. 
I don’t want nothin’ to do with the likes of you. You're 
a loafer, that’s what, an’ I ain’t asleep. You ain’t goin’ to 
do no spongin’ off me just because I’m marryin’ your sis- 
ter. Why don’t you go to work an’ earn an honest livin’, 
eh? Answer me that.” 

Martin’s philosophy asserted itself, dissipating his anger, 
and he hung up the receiver with a long whistle of incred- 
ulous amusement. But after the amusement came the re- 
action, and he was oppressed by his loneliness. Nobody 


understood him, nobody seemed to have any use for him, |,» 


except Brissenden, and Brissenden had disappeared, God 
alone knew where. 

Twilight was falling as Martin left the fruit store and 
turned homeward, his marketing on hisarm. Atthe corner 
an electric car had stopped, and at sight of a lean, familiar 
figure alighting, his heart leapt with joy. It was Brissen- 
den, and in the fleeting glimpse, ere the car started up, 
Martin noted the overcoat pockets, one bulging with books, 
the other bulging with a quart bottle of whiskey. 


CHAPTER XXXV 


BRISSENDEN gave no explanation of his long absence, 
nor did Martin pry into it. He was content to see his 
friend’s cadaverous face opposite him through the steam 
rising from a tumbler of toddy. 

“T, too, have not been idle,” Brissenden proclaimed, 
after hearing Martin’s account of the work he had ac- 
complished. 

He pulled a manuscript from his inside coat pocket and 
passed it to Martin, who looked at the title and glanced 
up curiously. 

“Yes, that’s it,’ Brissenden laughed. ‘Pretty good 
title, eh? ‘Ephemera’—it is the one word. And you’re 
responsible for it, what of your man, who is always the 
erected, the vitalized inorganic, the latest of the ephemera, 
the creature of temperature strutting his little space on 
the thermometer. It got into my head and I had to 
write it to get rid of it. Tell me what you think of it.” 

Martin’s face, flushed at first, paled as he read on. It 
was perfect art. Form triumphed over substance, if 
triumph it could be called where the last conceivable 
atom of substance had found expression in so_ perfect 
construction as to make Martin’s head swim with delight, 
to put passionate tears into his eyes, and to send chills 
creeping up and down his back. It was a long poem of 
six or seven hundred lines, and it was a fantastic, amazing, 
unearthly thing. It was terrific, impossible; and yet there 
it was, scrawled in black ink across the sheets of paper. 
It dealt with man and his soul-gropings in their ultimate 
terms, plumbing the abysses of space for the testimony 
of remotest suns and rainbow spectrums. It was a mad 
orgy of imagination, wassailing in the skull of a dying 
man who half sobbed under his breath and was quick 
with the wild flutter of fading heart-beats. The poem 

304 


MARTIN EDEN 305 


swung in majestic rhythm to the cool tumult of interstel- 
lar conflict, to the onset of starry hosts, to the impact 
of cold suns and the flaming up of nebule in the dark- 
ened void; and through it all, unceasing and faint,\ 
like a silver shuttle, ran the frail, piping voice of man, 
a querulous chirp amid the screaming of planets and the 
crash of systems. 

“There is nothing like it in literature,” Martin said, 
when at last he was able to speak. “It’s wonderful! — 
wonderful! It has gone to my head. I am drunken 
with it. That great, infinitesimal question —I can’t 
shake it out of my thoughts. That questing, eternal, 
ever recurring, thin little wailing voice of man is still 
ringing in my ears. It is like the dead- march of a enat 
amid the trumpeting of elephants and the roaring of 
lions. It is insatiable with microscopic desire. I know 
I’m making a fool of myself, but the thing has obsessed 
me. You are—I don’t know what you are—you are 
wonderful, that’s all. But how do you do it? How do 
you do it?” 

Martin paused from his rhapsody, only to break out 
afresh. 

“JT shall never write again. I am a dauber in clay. 
You have shown me the work of the real artificer-artisan. 
Genius! This is something more than genius. It tran- 
scends genius. It is truth gone mad. It is true, man, 
every line of it. I wonder if you realize that, you dog- 
matist. Science cannot give you the lie. It is the truth 
of the sneer, stamped out from the black iron of the 
Cosmos and interwoven with mighty rhythms of sound 
into a fabric of splendor and beauty. And now I won’t 
say another word. I am overwhelmed, crushed.’ Yes, I 
will, too. Let me market it for you.’ 

Brissenden grinned. ‘ There’s not a magazine in Chris- 
tendom that would dare to publish it— you know that.” 

‘‘J know nothing of the sort. I know there’s not a 
magazine in Christendom that wouldn’t jump at it. They 
don’t get things like that every day. That’s no mere 
poem of the year. It’s the poem of the century.” 


x 


306 MARTIN EDEN 


“T’d like to take you up on the proposition.” 

“Now don’t get cynical,” Martin exhorted. “The 
magazine editors are not wholly fatuous. I know that. 
And [ll close with you on the bet. Ill wager anything 
you want that ‘Ephemera’ is accepted either on the first 
or second offering.” 

“'There’s just one thing that prevents me from taking 
you.” Brissenden waited a moment. “The thing is 
big — the biggest ve ever done. I know that. It’s my 
swan song. I am almighty proud of it. I worship it. 
It’s better than whiskey. It is what I dreamed of — the 
great and perfect thing—when I was a simple young 
man, with sweet illusions and clean ideals. And I’ve 
got it, now, in my last grasp, and [ll not have it pawed 
over and soiled by a lot of swine. No, I won’t take the 
bet. It’s mine. I made it, and I’ve shared it with you.” 

“But think of the rest of the world,” Martin pro- 
tested. ‘The function of beauty is joy-making.”’ 

“It’s my beauty.” 

“‘ Don’t be selfish.” 

“Tm not selfish.” Brissenden grinned soberly in the 
way he had when pleased by the thing his thin lips were 
about to shape. ‘I’m as unselfish as a famished hog.” 

In vain Martin strove to shake him from his decision. 
Martin told him that his hatred of the magazines was 
rabid, fanatical, and that his conduct was a thousand times 
more despicable than that of the youth who burned the 
temple of Diana at Ephesus. Under the storm of denuncia- 
tion Brissenden complacently sipped his toddy and affirmed 
that everything the other said was quite true, with the 
exception of the magazine editors. His hatred of them 
knew no bounds, and he excelled Martin in denunciation 
when he turned upon them. 

“JT wish you’d type it for me,” he said. “You know 
how a thousand times better than any stenographer. And 
now I want to give you some advice.” He drew a bulky 
manuscript from his outside coat pocket. ‘ Here’s your 
‘Shame of the Sun.’ I’ve read it not once, but twice and 
three times—the highest compliment I can pay you. 





MARTIN EDEN 307 


After what you’ve said about ‘ Ephemera’ I must be silent. 
But this I will say : when ‘The Shame of the Sun’ is pub- 
lished, it will make a hit. It will start a controversy that 
will be worth thousands to you just in advertising.” 

Martin laughed. “I suppose your next advice will be 
to submit it to the magazines.” 

“By all means no—that is, if you want to see it in 
print. Offer it to the first-class houses. Some publisher’s 
reader may be mad enough or drunk enough to report 
favorably on it. You’ve read the books. The meat of 
them has been transmuted in the alembic of Martin Eden’s 
mind and poured into ‘The Shame of the Sun,’ and one 
day Martin Eden will be famous, and not the least of his 
fame will rest upon that work. So you must get a pub- 
lisher for it — the sooner the better.” 

Brissenden went home late that night; and just as he 
mounted the first step of the car, he swung suddenly back 
on Martin and thrust into his hand a small, tightly 
crumpled wad of paper. 

‘‘ Here, take this,” he said. ‘I was out to the races 
to-day, and I had the right dope.” 

The bell clanged and the car pulled out, leaving Martin 
wondering as to the nature of the crinkly, greasy wad he 
clutched in his hand. Back in his room he unrolled it 
and found a hundred-dollar bill. 

He did not scruple to use it. He knew his friend had 
always plenty of money, and he knew also, with profound 
certitude, that his success would enable him to repay it. 
In the morning he paid every bill, gave Maria three 
months’ advance on the room, and redeemed every pledge 
at the pawnshop. Next he bought Marian’s wedding pres- 
ent, and simpler presents, suitable to Christmas, for Ruth 
and Gertrude. And finally, onthe balanceremaining to him, 
he herded the whole Silva tribe down into Oakland. He 
was a winter late in redeeming his promise, but redeemed 
it was, for the last, least Silva got a pair of shoes, as well as 
Maria herself. Also, there were horns, and dolls, and toys 
of various sorts, and parcels and bundles of candies and 
nuts that filled the arms of all the Silvas to overflowing. 


308 MARTIN EDEN r 


It was with this extraordinary procession trooping 
at his and Maria’s heels into a confectioner’s in quest of 
the biggest candy-cane ever made, that he encountered 
Ruth and her mother. Mrs. Morse was shocked. Even 
Ruth was hurt, for she had some regard for appearances, 
and her lover, cheek by jowl with Maria, at the head of 
that army of Portuguese ragamufiins, was not a pretty 
sight. But it was not that which hurt so much as what 
she took to be his lack of pride and self-respect. Further, 
and keenest of all, she read into the incident the impossi- 
bility of his living down his working-class origin. ‘There 
was stigma enough in the fact of it, but shamelessly to 
flaunt it in the face of the world — her world — was going 
too far. Though her engagement to Martin had been kept 
secret, their long intimacy had not been unproductive of 
gossip; and in the shop, glancing covertly at her lover and 
his following, had been several of her acquaintances. She 
lacked the easy largeness of Martin and could not rise supe- 
rior to her environment. She had been hurt to the quick, 
and her sensitive nature was quivering with the shame 
of it. So it was, when Martin arrived later in the day, 
that he kept her present in his breast-pocket, defer- 
ring the giving of it toa more propitious occasion. Ruth 
in tears — passionate, angry tears—was a revelation to 
him. ‘The spectacle of her suffering convinced him that 
he had been a brute, yet in the soul of him he could not 
see how nor why. It never entered his head to be ashamed 
of those he knew, and to take the Silvas out to a Christ- 
mas treat could in no way, so it seemed to him, show 
lack of consideration for Ruth. On the other hand, he 
did see Ruth’s point of view, after she had explained it; 
and he looked upon it as a feminine weakness, such as 
afflicted all women and the best of women. 


CHAPTER XXXVI 


“ CoME on, — Ill show you the real dirt,” Brissenden 
said to him, one evening in January. 

They had dined together in San Francisco, and were 
at the Ferry Building, returning to Oakland, when the 
whim came to him to show Martin the “real dirt.” He 
turned and fled across the water-front, a meagre shadow 
in a flapping overcoat, with Martin straining to keep up 
with him. At a wholesale liquor store he bought two 
gallon-demijohns of old port, and with one in each hand 
boarded a Mission Street car, Martin at his heels burdened 
with several quart-bottles of whiskey. 

If Ruth could see me now, was his thought, while he 
wondered as to what constituted the real dirt. 

** Maybe nobody will be there,” Brissenden said, when 
they dismounted and plunged off to the right into the 
heart of the working-class ghetto, south of Market Street. 
“In which case you'll miss what you’ve been looking for 
so long.” 

“ And what the deuce is that?’ Martin asked. 

‘*Men, intelligent men, and not the gibbering nonen- 
tities I found you consorting with in that trader’s den. 
You read the books and you found yourself all alone. 
Well, ’m going to show you to-night some other men 
who’ve read the books, so that you won’t be lonely any 
more. \ 

* Not that I bother my head about their everlasting dis- 
cussions,” he said at the end of a block. ‘I’m not inter- 
ested in book philosophy. But you'll find these fellows 
intelligences and not bourgeois swine. But watch out, 
they'll talk an arm off of you on any subject under the sun. 

“Hope Norton’s there,” he panted a little later, resist- 
ing Martin’s effort to relieve him of the two demijohns. 

309 


310 MARTIN EDEN 


‘Norton’s an idealist—a Harvard man. Prodigious 
memory. Idealism led him to philosophic anarchy, and 
his family threw him off. Father’s a railroad president 
and many times millionnaire, but the son’s starving in 
‘Frisco, editing an anarchist sheet for twenty-five a 
month.”’ 

Martin was little acquainted in San Francisco, and not 
at all south of Market; so he had no idea of where he 
was being led. 

‘¢ Go ahead,” he said; ‘tell me about them beforehand. 
What do they do for a living? How do they happen to 
beiherey i 

“Hope Hamilton’s there.” Brissenden paused and 
rested his hands. ‘“Strawn-Hamilton’s his name — hy- 
phenated, you know — comes of old Southern stock. He’s 
a tramp — laziest man I ever knew, though he’s clerking, 
or trying to, in a socialist codperative store for six dol- 
lars a week. But he’s a confirmed hobo. ‘Tramped into 
town. I’ve seen him sit all day on a bench and never a 
bite pass his lips, and in the evening, when I invited 
him to dinner — restaurant two blocks away — have him 
say, ‘T’oo much trouble, old man. Buy me a package of 
cigarettes instead.’ He was a Spencerian like you till 
Kreis turned him to materialistic monism. I'll start him 
on monism if I can. Norton’s another monist — only he 
affirms naught but spirit. He can give Kreis and Hamil- 
ton all they want, too.” 

“ Who is Kreis ?” Martin asked. 

‘His rooms we’re going to. One time professor — 
fired from university — usual story. A mind like a steel 
trap. Makes his living any old way. I know he’s been a 
street fakir when he was down. Unscrupulous. Rob a 
_ corpse of a shroud—anything. Difference between him 
' and the bourgeoisie is that he robs without illusion. 
He’ll talk Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer, or Kant, or any- 
thing, but the only thing in this world, not excepting 
Mary, that he really cares for, is his monism. Haeckel is 
his little tin god. The only way to insult him is to take 
a slap at Haeckel. 


MARTIN EDEN 311 


“Here’s the hang-out.” Brissenden rested his demi- 
john at the upstairs entrance, preliminary to the climb. 
It was the usual two-story corner building, with a saloon 
and grocery underneath. “The gang lives here — got 
the whole upstairs to themselves. But Kreis is the only 
one who has two rooms. Come on.” 

No lights burned in the upper hall, but Brissenden 
threaded the utter blackness like a familiar ghost. He 
stopped to speak to Martin. 

“There’s one fellow — Stevens —a theosophist. Makes 
a pretty tangle when he gets going. Just now he’s dish- 
washer in a restaurant. Likesa goodcigar. I’ve seen him 
eat in a ten-cent hash-house and pay fifty cents for the 
cigar he smoked afterward. Ive got acouple in my pocket 
for him, if he shows up. 

“ And there’s another fellow — Parry —an Australian, 
a statistician and a sporting encyclopedia. Ask him the 
grain output of Paraguay for 1903, or the English impor- 
tation of sheetings into China for 1890, or at what weight 
Jimmy Britt fought Battling Nelson, or who was welter- 
weight champion of the United States in ’68, and you'll 
get the correct answer with the automatic celerity of a 
slot-machine. And there’s Andy, a stone-mason, has ideas 
on everything, a good chess-player; and another fellow, 
Harry, a baker, red hot socialist and strong union man. 
By the way, you remember the Cooks’ and Waiters’ strike 
— Hamilton was the chap who organized that union and 
precipitated the strike — planned it all out in advance, 
right heve in Kreis’s rooms. Did it just for the fun of it, 
but was too lazy to stay by the union. Yet he could have 
risen high if he wanted to. There’s no end to the possibil- 
ities in that man —if he weren’t so insuperably lazy.” 

Brissenden advanced through the darkness till a thread 
of light marked the threshold of a door. A knock and an 
answer opened it, and Martin found himself shaking hands 
with Kreis, a handsome brunette man, with dazzling white 
teeth, a drooping black mustache, and large, flashing black 
eyes. Mary,a matronly young blonde, was washing dishes 
in the little back room that served for kitchen and dining 


312 MARTIN EDEN 


room. The front room served as bedchamber and living 
room. Overhead was the week’s washing, hanging in fes- 
toons so low that Martin did not see at first the two men 
talking inacorner. They hailed Brissenden and his demi- 
johns with acclamation, and, on being introduced, Martin 
learned they were Andy and Parry. He joined them and 
listened attentively to the description of a prize-fight Parry 
had seen the night before ; while Brissenden, in his glory, 
plunged into the manufacture of a toddy and the serving 
of wine and whiskey-and-sodas. At his command, “ Bring 
in the clan,” Andy departed to go the round of the rooms 
for the lodgers. 

“ We’re lucky that most of them are here,” Brissenden 
whispered to Martin. “ There’s Norton and Hamilton; 
come on and meet them. Stevens isn’t around, I hear. 
I’m going to get them started on monismif I can. Wait 
till they get a few jolts in them and they’ll warm up.” 

At first the conversation was desultory. Nevertheless 
Martin could not fail to appreciate the keen play of their 
minds. ‘hey were men with opinions, though the opinions 
often clashed, and, though they were witty and clever, they 
were not superficial. He swiftly saw, no matter upon 
what they talked, that each man applied the correlation of 
knowledge and had also a deep-seated and unified concep- 
tion of society and the Cosmos. Nobody manufactur2d 
their opinions for them; they were all rebels of one variety 
or another, and their lips were strangers to platitudes. 
Never had Martin, at the Morses’, heard so amazing a range 
of topics discussed. There seemed no limit save time to 
the things they were alive to. The talk wandered from 
Mrs. Humphry Ward’s new book to Shaw’s latest play, 
through the future of the drama to reminiscences of 
Mansfield. ‘They appreciated or sneered at the morning 
editorials, jumped from labor conditions in New Zealand 
to Henry James and Brander Matthews, passed on to the 
German designs in the Far East and the economic aspect 
of the Yellow Peril, wrangled over the German elections 
and Bebel’s last speech, and settled down to local polities, 
the latest plans and scandals in the union labor party ad- 


MARTIN EDEN p 313 


ministration, and the wires that were pulled to bring about 
the Coast Seamen’s strike. Martin was struck by the inside 
knowledge they possessed. They knew what was never 
printed in the newspapers — the wires and strings and the 
hidden hands that made the puppets dance. To Martin’s 
surprise, the girl, Mary, joined in the conversation, dis- 
playing an intelligence he had never encountered in the 
few women he had met. They talked together on Swin- 
burne and Rossetti, after which she led him beyond his 
depth into the by-paths of French literature. His revenge 
came when she defended Maeterlinck and he brought into 
action the carefully-thought-out thesis of ‘*‘ The Shame of 
the Sun.” 

Several other men had dropped in, and the air was thick 
with tobacco smoke, when Brissenden waved the red 
flag. 

“ Here’s fresh meat for your axe, Kreis,” he said; “a 
rose-white youth with the ardor of a lover for Herbert 
Spencer. Make a Haeckelite of him —if you can.” 

Kreis seemed to wake up and flash like some metallic, 
magnetic thing, while Norton looked at Martin sympatheti- . 
cally, with a sweet, girlish smile, as much as to say that 
he would be amply protected. 

Kreis: began directly on Martin, but step by step Norton 
interfered, until he and Kreis were off and away in a per- 
sonal battle. Martin listened and fain would have rubbed 
his eyes. It was impossible that this should be, much less 
in the labor ghetto south of Market. The books were alive 
in these men. They talked with fire and enthusiasm, the 
intellectual stimulant stirring them as he had seen drink 
and anger stir other men. What he heard was no longer 
the philosophy ot the dry, printed word, written by half- 
mythical demigods like Kant and Spencer. It was living 
philosophy, with warm, red blood, incarnated in these two 
men till its very features worked with excitement. Now 
and again other men joined in, and all followed the dis- 
cussion with cigarettes going out in their hands and with 
alert, intent faces. 

Idealism had never attracted Martin, but the exposition 


314 MARTIN EDEN 


it now received at the hands of Norton was a revelation. 
The logical plausibility of it, that made an appeal to his 
intellect, seemed missed by Kreis and Hamilton, who 
sneered at Norton as a metaphysician, and who, in 
turn, sneered back at them as metaphysicians. Phe- 
nomenon and nowmenon were bandied back and forth. 
They charged him with attempting to explain conscious- 
ness by itself. He charged them with word-jugglery, 
with reasoning from words to theory instead of from facts 
to theory. At this they were aghast. It was the cardinal 
tenet of their mode of reasoning to start with facts and to 
give names to the facts. 

When Norton wandered into the intricacies of Kant, » 
Kreis reminded him that all good little German philoso- 
phies when they died went to Oxford. A _ little later 
Norton reminded them of Hamilton’s Law of Parsimony, 
the application of which they immediately claimed for 
every reasoning process of theirs. And Martin hugged 
his knees and exulted in it all. But Norton was no Spen- 
cerian, and he, too, strove for Martin’s philosophic soul, 
talking as much at him as to his two opponents. 

“You know Berkeley has never been answered,” he 
said, looking directly at Martin. ‘ Herbert Spencer came 
the nearest, which was not very near. Even the stanch- 
est of Spencer’s followers will not go farther. I was read- 
ing an essay of Saleeby’s the other day, and the best 
Saleeby could say was that Herbert Spencer nearly suc- 
ceeded in answering Berkeley.” 

“You know what Hume said?” Hamilton asked. Nor- 
ton nodded, but Hamilton gave it for the benefit of the © 
rest. ‘ He said that Berkeley’s arguments admit of no 
answer and produce no conviction.” 

“In his, Hume’s, mind,” was the reply. ‘“ And Hume’s 
mind was the same as yours, with this difference : he was 
wise enough to admit there was no answering Berkeley.” 

Norton was sensitive and excitable, though he never 
lost his head, while Kreis and Hamilton were like a pair 
of cold-blooded savages, seeking out tender places to prod 
and poke. As the evening grew late, Norton, smarting 


MARTIN EDEN. 315 


under the repeated charges of being a metaphysician, 
clutching his chair to keep from jumping to his feet, his 
eray eyes snapping and his girlish face grown harsh and 
sure, made a grand attack upon their position. 

« All right, you Haeckelites, I may reason like a medi- 
cine man, but, pray, how do youreason? You have noth- 
ing to stand on, you unscientific dogmatists with your 
positive science which you are always lugging about into 
places it has no right to be. Long before the school of 
materialistic monism arose, the ground was removed so 
that there could be no foundation. Locke was the man, 
John Locke. Two hundred years ago— more than that, 
even—in his ‘Essay concerning the Human Understand- 
ing,’ he proved the non-existence of innate ideas. The 
best of it is that that is precisely what you claim. To- 
night, again and again, you have asserted the non-existence 
of innate ideas. 

“ And what does that mean? It means that you can 
never know ultimate reality. Your brains are empty 
when you are born. Appearances, or phenomena, are all 
the content your minds can receive from your five senses. 
Then noumena, which are not in your minds when you are 
born, have no way of getting in—” 

“IT deny — ” Kreis started to interrupt. 

“ You wait till ’'m done,” Norton shouted. ‘ You can 
know only that much of the play and interplay of force 
and matter as impinges in one way or another on your 
senses. You see, I am willing to admit, for the sake of 
the argument, that matter exists; and what I am about 
to do is to efface you by your own argument. I can’t 
do it any other way, for you are both congenitally unable 
to understand a‘ philosophic abstraction. 

* And now, what do you know of matter, according to 
your own positive science? You know it only by its 
phenomena, its appearances. You are aware only of its 
changes, or of such changes in it as cause changes in 
your consciousness. Positive science deals only with phe- 
nomena, yet you are foolish enough to strive to be on- 
tologists and to deal with noumena. Yet, by the very 


316: MARTIN EDEN 


definition of positive science, science is concerned only 
with appearances.. As somebody has said, phenomenal 
knowledge cannot transcend phenomena. 

“You cannot answer Berkeley, even if you have anni- 
hilated Kant, and yet, perforce, you assume that Berkeley 
is wrong when you affirm that science proves the non- 
existence of God, or, as much to the point, the existence 
of matter.— You know I granted the reality of matter 
only in order to make myself intelligible to your under- 
standing. Be positive scientists, if you please; but on- 
tology has no place in positive science, so leave it alone. 
Spencer is right in his agnosticism, but if Spencer — ” 

But it was time to catch the last ferry-boat for Oak- 
land, and Brissenden and Martin slipped out, leaving 
Norton still talking and Kreis and Hamilton waiting to 
pounce on him like a pair of hounds as soon as he finished. 

*“ You have given me a glimpse of fairyland,” Martin 
said on the ferry-boat. “It makes lfe worth while to 
meet people like that. My mind is all worked up. I 
never appreciated idealism before. Yet I can’t accept it. 
I know that I shall always be a realist. I am so made, I 
guess. But Id like to have made a reply to Kreis and 
Hamilton, and I think I’d have had a word or two for 
Norton. I didn’t see that Spencer was damaged any. I’m 
as excited as a child on its first visit to the circus. I see 
I must read up some more. I’m going to get hold of 
Saleeby. I still think Spencer is unassailable, and next 
time I’m going to take a hand myself.” 

But Brissenden, breathing painfully, had dropped off 
to sleep, his chin buried in a scarf and resting on his 
sunken chest, his body wrapped in the long overcoat and 
shaking to the vibration of the propellers. 


CHAPTER XXXVII 


THE first thing Martin did next morning was to go 
counter both to Brissenden’s advice and command. “The 
Shame of the Sun” he wrapped and mailed to The Acrop- 
olts. He believed he could find magazine publication for 
it, and he felt that recognition by the magazines would 
commend him to the book-publishing houses. ‘“ Ephem- 
era” he likewise wrapped and mailed to a magazine. 
Despite Brissenden’s prejudice against the magazines, 
which was a pronounced mania with him, Martin decided 
that the great poem should see print. He did not intend, 
however, to publish it without the other’s permission. 
His plan was to get it accepted by one of the high maga- 
zines, and, thus armed, again to wrestle with Brissenden — 
for consent. 

Martin began, that morning, a story which he had 
sketched out a number of weeks before and which ever 
since had been worrying him with its insistent clamor to 
be created. Apparently it was to be a rattling sea story, 
a tale of twentieth-century adventure and romance, han- 
dling real characters, ina real world, under real conditions. 
But beneath the swing and go of the story was to be some- 
thing else — something that the superficial reader would’ 
never discern and which, on the other hand, would not 
diminish in any way the interest and enjoyment for such 
areader. It was this, and not the mere story, that impelled 
Martin to write it. For that matter, it was always the 
great, universal motif that suggested plots to him. After 
having found such a motif, he cast about for the particular 
persons and particular location in time and space where- 
with and wherein to utter the universal thing. ‘“ Over- 
due ” was the title he had decided for it, and its length he 
believed would not be more than sixty thousand words — 

317 


318 MARTIN EDEN 


a bagatelle for him with his splendid vigor of production. 
On this first day he took hold of it with conscious delight 
in the mastery of his tools. He no longer worried for fear 
that the sharp, cutting edges should slip and mar his 
work. The long months of intense application and study 
had brought their reward. He could now devote himself 
with sure hand to the larger phases of the thing he 
shaped; and as he worked, hour after hour, he felt, as 
never before, the sure and cosmic grasp with which he 
held life and the affairs of life. ‘ Overdue” would tell a 
story that would be true of its particular characters and 
its particular events; but it would tell, too, he was con- 
fident, great vital things that would be true of all time, 
and all sea, and all life— thanks to Herbert Spencer, he 
thought, leaning back for a moment from the table. Ay, 
thanks to Herbert Spencer and to the master-key of life, 
evolution, which Spencer had placed in his hands. 

He was conscious that it was great stuff he was writing. 
“Tt will go! It will go!” was the refrain that kept 
sounding in his ears. Of course it would go. At last 
he was turning out the thing at which the magazines 
would jump. ‘The whole story worked out before him in 
lightning flashes. He broke off from it long enough to 
write a paragraph in his note-book. This would be the 
last paragraph in “ Overdue” ; but so thoroughly was the 
whole book already composed in his brain that he could 
write, weeks before he had arrived at the end, the end 
itself. He compared the tale, as yet unwritten, with the 
tales of the sea-writers, and he felt it to be immeasurably 
superior. ‘There’s only one man who could touch it,” 
he murmured aloud, “and that’s Conrad. And it ought 
to make even him sit up and shake hands with me, and 
say, ‘Well done, Martin, my boy.’ ” 

He toiled on all day, recollecting, at the last moment, 
that he was to have dinner at the Morses’. Thanks to 
Brissenden, his black suit was out of pawn and he was 
again eligible for dinner parties. Down town he stopped 
off long enough to run into the library and search for 
Saleeby’s books. He drew out “The Cycle of Life,” and 


MARTIN EDEN 319 


on the car turned to the essay Norton had mentioned on 
Spencer. As Martin read, he grew angry. His face 
flushed, his jaw set, and unconsciously his hand clenched, 
unclenched, and clenched again as if he were taking fresh 
grips upon some hateful thing out of which he was squeezing 
the life. When he left the car, he strode along the sidewalk 
as a wrathful man will stride, and he rang the Morse bell 
with such viciousness that it roused him to consciousness 
of his condition, so that he entered in good nature, smil- 
ing with amusement at himself. No sooner, however, was 
he inside than a great depression descended upon him. 
He fell from the height where he had been up-borne all 
day on the wings of inspiration. “ Bourgeois,” “ trader’s 
den” — Brissenden’s epithets repeated themselves in his 
mind. But what of that ? he demanded angrily. He was 
marrying Ruth, not her family. 

It seemed to him that he had never seen Ruth more 
beautiful, more spiritual and ethereal and at the same 
time more healthy. There was color in her cheeks, and 
her eyes drew him again and again — the eyes in which 
he had first read immortality. He had forgotten im- 
mortality of late, and the trend of his scientific reading 
had been away from it; but here, in Ruth’s eyes, he read 
an argument without words that transcended all worded 
arguments. He saw that in her eyes before which all 
discussion fled away, for he saw love there. And in his 
own eyes was love; and love was unanswerable. Such 
was his passionate doctrine. 

The half hour he had with her, before they went in to 
dinner, left him supremely happy and supremely satisfied 
with life. Nevertheless, at table, the inevitable reaction 
and exhaustion‘consequent upon the hard day seized hold 
of him. He was aware that his eyes were tired and that 
he was irritable. He remembered it was at this table, at 
which he now sneered and was so often bored, that he had 
first eaten with civilized beings in what he had imagined 
was an atmosphere of high culture and refinement. He 
caught a glimpse of that pathetic figure of him, so long 
ago, a self-conscious savage, sprouting sweat at every » 


320 MARTIN EDEN 


pore in an agony of apprehension, puzzled by the be- 
wildering minutie of eating-implements, tortured by the 
ogre of a servant, striving at a leap to live at such dizzy so- 
cial altitude, and deciding in the end to be frankly himself, 
pretending no knowledge and no polish he did not possess. 

He glanced at Ruth for reassurance, much in the same 
manner that a passenger, with sudden panic thought of 
possible shipwreck, will strive to locate the life-preservers. 
Well, that much had come out of it—love and Ruth. 
All the rest had failed to stand the test of the books. 
But Ruth and love had stood the test; for them he found 
a biological sanction. Love was the most exalted ex- 
pression of life. Nature had been busy designing him, 
as she had been busy with all normal men, for the purpose 
of loving. She had spent ten thousand centuries — ay, a 
hundred thousand and a million centuries— upon the 
task, and he was the best she could do. She had made 
love the strongest thing in him, increased its power a 
myriad per cent with her gift of imagination, and sent 
him forth into the ephemera to thrill and melt and mate. 
His hand sought Ruth’s hand beside him hidden by the 
table, and a warm pressure was given and received. She 
looked at him a swift instant, and her eyes were radiant 
and melting. So were his in the thrill that pervaded 
him ; nor did he realize how much that was radiant and 
melting in her eyes had been aroused by what she had 
seen in his. 

Across the table from him, cater-cornered, at Mr. Morse’s 
right, sat Judge Blount, a local superior court judge. 
Martin had met him a number of times and had failed to © 
like him. He and Ruth’s father were discussing labor 
union politics, the local situation, and socialism, and Mr. 
Morse was endeavoring to twit Martin on the latter topic. 
At last Judge Blount looked across the table with benignant 
and fatherly pity. Martin smiled to himself. 

“You'll grow out of it, young man,” he said soothingly. 
“Time is the best cure for such youthful distempers.” He 
turned to Mr. Morse. “I do not believe discussion is 
good in such cases. It makes the patient obstinate.” 


MARTIN EDEN 321 


“That is true,” the other assented gravely. “But 
it is well to warn the patient occasionally of his condi- 
tion.” 

Martin laughed merrily, but it was with an effort. The 
day had been too long, the day’s effort too intense, and he 
was deep in the throes of the reaction. 

“ Undoubtedly you are both excellent doctors,” he said ; 
“but if you care a whit for the opinion of the patient, let 
him tell you that you are poor diagnosticians. In fact, 
you are both suffering from the disease you think you find 
inme. Asforme,lamimmune. The socialist philosophy 
that riots half-baked in your veins has passed me by.” 

“ Clever, clever,” murmured the judge. ‘ An excellent 
ruse in controversy, to reverse positions.” 

“Out of your mouth.” Martin’s eyes were sparkling, 
but he kept control of himself. “You see, Judge, I’ve 
heard your campaign speeches. Bysome henidical process 
— henidical, by the way, is a favorite word of mine which 
nobody understands — by some henidical process you per- 
suade yourself that you believe in the competitive system 
and the survival of the strong, and at the same time you 
indorse with might and main all sorts of measures to shear 
the strength from the strong.” 

“ My young man—” | 

“Remember, I’ve heard your campaign speeches,” 
Martin warned. “It’s on record, your position on inter- 
state commerce regulation, on regulation of the railway 
trust and Standard Oil, on the conservation of the forests, 
on a thousand and one restrictive measures that are noth- 
ing else than socialistic.” 

‘Do you mean to tell me that you do not believe in reg- 
ulating these various outrageous exercises of power?” 

« That’s not the point. I mean to tell you that you are 
a poor diagnostician. J mean to tell you that I am not 
suffering from the microbe of socialism. I mean to tell 
you that it is you who are suffering from the emasculating 
ravages of that same microbe. As for me, I am an in- 
veterate opponent of socialism just as I am an inveterate 


opponent of your own mongrel democracy that is nothing ~ 


ey. 


O22 MARTIN EDEN 


else than pseudo-socialism masquerading under a garb of 
words that will not stand the test of the dictionary. 

“JT am a reactionary —so complete a reactionary that 
my position is incomprehensible to you who live ina veiled 
lie of social organization and whose sight is not keen enough 
to pierce the veil. You make believe that you believe 
in the survival of the strong and the rule of the strong. 
I believe. That is the difference. When I was a trifle 
younger, — a few months younger, —I believed the same 
thing. You see, the ideas of you and yours had impressed 
me. But merchants and traders are cowardly rulers at 
best; they grunt and grub all their days in the trough of 
money-getting, and I have swung back to aristocracy, if 
you please. Iam the only individualist in this room. I 
look to the state for nothing. I look only to the strong 
man, the man on horseback, to save the state from its own 
rotten futility. 

‘Nietzsche was right. I won’t take the time to tell 
“you who Nietzsche was, but he was right. The world 
belongs to the strong—to the strong who are noble as 
well and who do not wallow in the swine-trough of trade 
and exchange. ‘The world belongs to the true noblemen, 
to the great blond beasts, to the noncompromisers, to the 
‘yes-sayers.’ And they will eat you up, you socialists 
who are afraid of socialism and who think yourselves in- 
dividualists. Your slave-morality of the meek and lowly 
will never save you. —Oh, it’s all Greek, I know, and I 
won't bother you any more with it. But remember one 
thing. There aren’t half a dozen individualists in Oak- 
land, but Martin Eden is one of them.” 

He signified that he was done with the discussion, and 
turned to Ruth. 

“Tm wrought up to-day,” he said in an undertone. 
‘‘ All I want to do is to love, not talk.” 

He ignored Mr. Morse, who said : — 

“Tam unconvinced. All socialists are Jesuits. That 
is the way to tell them.” 

“We'll make a good Republican out of you yet,” said 
Judge Blount. 


MARTIN EDEN O20 


“The man on horseback will arrive before that time,” 
Martin retorted with good humor, and retyrned to Ruth. 

But Mr. Morse was not content. He did not like the 
laziness and the disinclination for sober, legitimate work 
of this prospective son-in-law of his, for whose ideas he had 
no respect and of whose nature he had no understanding. 
So he turned the conversation to Herbert Spencer. Judge 
Blount ably seconded him, and Martin, whose ears had 
pricked at the first mention of the philosopher’s name, 
listened to the judge enunciate a grave and complacent 
diatribe against Spencer. From time to time Mr. Morse 
glanced at Martin, as much as to say, “ There, my boy, 
you see.” : 

“ Chattering daws,” Martin muttered under his breath 
and went on talking with Ruth and Arthur. 

But the long day and the “real dirt” of the night before 
were telling upon him ; and, besides, still burning in his 
mind was what had made him angry when he read it on 
the car. 

“What is the matter?” Ruth asked suddenly, alarmed 
by the effort he was making to contain himself. 

“ There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert 
Spencer is its prophet,” Judge Blount was saying at that 
moment. 

Martin turned upon him. 

“A cheap judgment,” he remarked quietly. ‘I heard 
it first in the City Hall Park, on the lips of a workingman 
who ought to have known better. I have heard it often 
since, and each time the clap-trap of it nauseates me. You 
ought to be ashamed of yourself. To hear that great and 
noble man’s name upon your lipsis like finding a dew-drop 
in a cesspool. You are disgusting.” 

It was like a thunderbolt. Judge Blount glared at him 
with apoplectic countenance, and silence reigned. Mr. 
Morse was secretly pleased. He could see that his 
daughter was shocked. It was what he wanted to 
do —to bring out the innate ruffianism of this man he 
did not like. 

Ruth’s hand sought Martin’s beseechingly under the table, 


324 MARTIN EDEN 


but his blood was up. He.was inflamed by the intellectual 
pretence and fraud of those who sat in the high places. 
A Superior Court Judge! It was only several years before 
* that he had looked up from the mire at such glorious en- 
tities and deemed them gods. 

Judge Blount recovered himself and attempted to go 
on, addressing himself to Martin with an assumption of 
politeness that the latter understood was for the benefit of 
the ladies. Even this added to his anger. Was there no 
honesty in the world ? 

*“ You can’t discuss Spencer with me,” he cried. ‘ You 
do not know any more about Spencer than do his own 
countrymen. But it is no fault of yours, I grant. It is 
just a phase of the contemptible ignorance of the times. 
I ran across a sample of it on my way here this evening. 
I was reading an essay by Saleeby on Spencer. You 
should read it. It is accessible to all men. You can buy 
it in any book-store or draw it from the public library. 
You would feel ashamed of your paucity of abuse and ig- 
norance of that noble man compared with what Saleeby 
has collected on the subject. It is a record of shame that 
would shame your shame. 

“¢T’he philosopher of the half-educated,’ he was called 
by an academic philosopher who was not worthy to pollute 
the atmosphere he breathed. I don’t think you have read 
ten pages of Spencer, but there have been critics, assumably 
more intelligent than you, who have read no more than 
you of Spencer, who publicly challenged his followers to 
adduce one single idea from all his writings — from Her- 
bert Spencer’s writings, the man who has impressed the 
stamp of his genius over the whole field of scientific re- 
search and modern thought; the father of psychology; 
the man who revolutionized pedagogy, so that to-day the 
child of the French peasant is taught the three R’s accord- 
ing to principles laid down by him. And the little gnats 
of men sting his memory when they get their very bread 
and butter from the technical application of his ideas. 
W hat little of worth resides in their brains is largely due to 
him. It is certain that had he never lived, most of what 


MARTIN EDEN 325 


is correct in their parrot-learned a ek would be 
absent. 

«And yet a man like Principal F Gr batike of Oxford — 
aman who sits in an even higher place than you, Judge 
Blount — has said that Spencer will be dismissed by pos- 
terity as a poet and dreamer rather than a thinker. 
Yappers and blatherskites, the whole brood of them! 
‘“ Hirst Principles” is not wholly destitute of a certain lit- 
erary power, said one of them. And others of them have 
said that he was an industrious plodder rather than an 
original thinker. Yappers and blatherskites! Yappers 
and blatherskites !”’ 

Martin ceased abruptly, in a dead silence. Everybody 
in Ruth’s family looked up to Judge Blount as a man of 
power and achievement, and they were horrified at Mar- 
tin’s outbreak. The remainder of the dinner passed like 
a funeral, the judge and Mr. Morse confining their talk to 
each other, and the rest of the conversation being ex- 
tremely desultory. Then afterward, when Ruth and 
Martin were alone, there was a scene. 

*“ You are unbearable,” she wept. 

But his anger still smouldered, and he kept muttering, 
“ The beasts ! The beasts |” 

When she averred he had insulted the judge, he re- 
torted :— 

“ By telling the truth about him ?” 

‘“*T don’t care whether it was true or not,” she insisted. 
“There are certain bounds of decency, and you had no» 
license to insult anybody.” 

“Then where did Judge Blount get the license to as- 
sault truth?” Martin demanded. “Surely to assault 
truth is a more serious misdemeanor than to insult a pygmy 
personality such as the judge’s. He did worse than that. 
He blackened the name of a great, noble man who is dead. 
Oh, the beasts ! The beasts! ” 

His complex anger flamed afresh, and Ruth was in ter- 
ror of him. Never had she seen him so angry, and it was 
all mystified and unreasonable to her comprehension. 
And yet, through her very terror ran the fibres of fascina- 


326 MARTIN EDEN 


tion that had drawn and that still drew her to him — that 
had compelled her to lean towards him, and, in that mad 
culminating moment, lay her hands upon his neck. She 
was hurt and outraged by what had taken place, and yet 
she lay in his arms and quivered while he went on mutter- 
ing, “The beasts! The beasts!” And she still lay there 
when he said: “Ill not bother your table again, dear. 
They do not lke me, and it is wrong of me to thrust my 
objectionable presence upon them. Besides, they are just 
as objectionable to me. Faugh! They are sickening. 
And to think of it, J dreamed in my innocence that the 
persons who sat in the high places, who lived in fine 
houses and had educations and bank accounts, were worth 
“while !” 


CHAPTER XXXVIII 


“ CoME on, let’s go down to the local.” 

So spoke Brissenden, faint from a hemorrhage of half 
an hour before—the second hemorrhage in three days. 
The perennial whiskey glass was in his hands, and he 
drained it with shaking fingers. 

“ What do I want with socialism?” Martin demanded. 

“Outsiders are allowed five-minute speeches,” the sick 
man urged. “Get up and spout. Tell them why you 
don’t want socialism. Tell them what you think about 
them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into 
them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of 
it. It will do them good. Discussion is what they want, 
and what you want, too. You see, I’d like to see youa 
socialist before ’m gone. It will give you a sanction for 
your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in 
_the time of disappointment that is coming to you.”’ 

“‘T never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a so- 
cialist,” Martin pondered. ‘“ You detest the crowd so. 
Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to 
your «esthetic soul.” He pointed an accusing finger at 
the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. ‘“ Social- 
ism doesn’t seem to save you.” 

“Tm very sick,” was the answer. ‘ With you it is dif- 
ferent. You have health and much to live for, and you 
must be handcuffed to lifesomehow. As forme, you won- 
der why I am a socialist. Jl tell you. It is because 
socialism is inevitable ; because the present rotten and ir- 
rational system cannot endure; because the day is past for | 
your man on horseback. ‘The slaves won’t stand for it. 
They are too many, and willy-nilly they’ll drag down the 
would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can’t 
get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole 

327 


328 MARTIN EDEN 


slave-morality. It’s not a nice mess, Ill allow. But it’s 
been a-brewing and swallow it you must. You are antedi- 
luvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. ‘The past is 
past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a lar. 
Of course I don’t like the crowd, but what’s a poor chap to 
do? We can’t have the man on horseback, and anything 
is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come 
on, anyway. I’m loaded to the guards now, and if I sit 
here any longer, I’ll get drunk. And you know the doc- 
tor says —damn the doctor! Dll fool him yet.” 

It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall 
packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the 
working class. ‘The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin’s 
admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism. 
The man’s stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened 
chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, 
and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the 
feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men 
who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the 
end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a creature 
was asymbol. He was the figure that stood forth repre- 
sentative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and 
inefficients who perished according to biological law on the 
ragged confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of 
their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities 
for codperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional 
man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from 
her prolific hand she selected only the best. It was by the 
same method that men, aping her, bred race-horses and cu- 
cumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have de- © 
vised a better method; but creatures of this particular 
Cosmos must put up with this particular method. Of 
course, they could squirm as they perished, as the social- 
ists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the per- 
spiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled 
together for some new device with which to minimize the 
penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos. 

So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden 
urged him to give them hell. He obeyed the mandate, 


4 


MARTIN EDEN 829 


walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and ad- 
dressing the chairman. He began ina low voice, haltingly, 
forming into order the ideas which had surged in his 
brain while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five 
minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when 
Martin’s five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his at- 
tack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had 
caught their interest, and the audience urged the chair- 
man by acclamation to extend Martin’s time. They ap- 
preciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they 
listened intently, following every word. He spoke with 
fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon 
the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly al- 
luding to his hearers as the slavesin question. He quoted 
Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law 
of development. 

** And so,” he concluded, in a swift résumé, “no state 
composed of the slave-types can endure. ‘The old law of 
development still holds. In the struggle for existence, as 
I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong 
tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the 
weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that 
the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so 
long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each genera- 
tion increases. ‘That is development. But you slaves — 
it is too bad to be slaves, I grant — but you slaves dream 
of a society where the law of development will be annulled, 
where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where 
every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as 
many. times a day as he desires, and where all will marry 
and have progeny —the weak as well as the strong. 
What will be the result? No longer will the strength 
and life-value of each generation increase. On the con- 
trary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your 
slave philosophy. Your society of slaves —of, by, and 
for, slaves — must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as 
the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces. 

“Remember, I am enunciating biology and not senti- 
mental ethics. No state of slaves can stand —”’ 


330 MARTIN EDEN 


‘“‘ How about the United States ?” a man yelled from the 
audience. — 

“And how about it?” Martin retorted. ‘The thirteen 
colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic 
so-called. The slaves were their own masters. ‘There 
were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn’t 
get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a 
new set of masters — not the great, virile, noble men, but 
the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And 
they enslaved you over again — but not frankly, as the 
true, noble men would do with weight of their own right 
arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by whee- 
dling and cajolery and lies. ‘They have purchased your 
slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, 
and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery 
your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children 
are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United 
States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly shel- 
tered nor properly fed. 

“ But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves 
can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must 
annul the law of development. No sooner can a slave 
society be organized than deterioration setsin. It is easy 
for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but 
where is the new law of development that will maintain 
your strength ? Formulate it. Isit already formulated ? 
Then state it.” 

Martin took his seat amidst ‘an uproar of voices. A 
score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition 
from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vocifer-_ 
ous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and ex- 
cited gestures, they replied to the attack. It wasa wild 
night — but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. 
Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers 
replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines 
of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, 
not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the 
old laws. ‘They were too earnest to be always polite, and 
more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order. 


MARTIN EDEN 331 


It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, de- 
tailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the 
urgent need of journalism for sensation. He was not a 
bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He 
was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a 
comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these 
wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a 
great respect for those who sat in the high places and 
dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, 
he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of 
the perfect reporter who is able to make something — even 
a great deal — out of nothin 

He did not know what all the talk was about. It 
was not necessary. Words like revolution gave him his 
cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire 
skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct 
a whole speech from the one word revolution. He did it 
that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had 
made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and 
made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his 
reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red-shirt 
socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and 
it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color 
—wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degene- 
rate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched 
fists raised on high, and all projected against a back- 
ground of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry 
men. 


CHAPTER XXXIX 


Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next 
morning’s paper. It was a novel experience to find him- 
self head-lined, on the first page at that ; and he was sur- 
prised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of 
the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech 
the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at 
first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he 
tossed the paper aside with a laugh. 

“¢ Hither the man was drunk or criminally malicious,” he 
said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Bris- 
senden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair. 

“ But what do you care?” Brissenden asked. ‘Surely 
you don’t desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that 
read the newspapers ?” 

Martin thought for a while, then said : — 

“No, I really don’t care for their approval, not a whit. 
On the other hand, it’s very likely to make my relations 
with Ruth’s family a trifle awkward. Her father always 
contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will 
clinch his belief. Not that I care for his opinion — but 
what’s the odds? I want to read you what I’ve been 
doing to-day. It’s ‘Overdue,’ of course, and I’m just 
about halfway through.” 

He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door 
and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced 
briskly about him, noting the oil-burner and the kitchen in 
the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin. 

‘Sit down,” Brissenden said. 

Martin made room for the young man on the bed and 
waited for him to broach his business. 

“T heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I’ve come 
to interview you,” he began. 

Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh. 

332 


MARTIN EDEN i 333 


“A brother socialist ?” the reporter asked, with a quick 
glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that 
cadaverous and dying man. 

“And he wrote that report,” Martin said softly. “ Why, 
he is only a boy!” 

** Why don’t you poke him?” Brissenden asked. “I'd 
give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five 
minutes.” 

The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking 
over him and around him and at him. But he had been 
commended for his brilliant description of the socialist 
meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal 
interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized 
menace to society. 

*“ You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. 
Eden?” hesaid. ‘Tve a staff photographer outside, you 
see, and he says it will be better to take you right away 
before the sun gets lower. Then we can have the inter- 
view afterward.” 

“A photographer,” Brissenden said meditatively. 
“ Poke him, Martin! Poke him!” 

“T cuess I’m getting old,” was the answer. “I know I 
ought, but I really haven’t the heart. It doesn’t seem to 
matter.” 

“For his mother’s sake,” Brissenden urged. 

“It’s worth considering,” Martin replied; “but it 
doesn’t seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient en- 
ergy inme. You see, it does take energy to give a fellow 
a poking. Besides, what does it matter?” 

“That’s right — that’s the way to take it,” the cub an- 
nounced airily, though he had already begun to glance 
anxiously at the door. 

“But it wasn’t true, not a word of what he wrote,” 
Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden. 

“Tt was just in a general way a description, you under- 
stand,” the cub ventured, “and besides, it’s good advertis- 
ing. That’s what counts. It was a favor to you.’ 

“It’s good advertising, mean old boy,” Brissenden 
repeated solemnly. 


304 MARTIN EDEN 


«“ And it was a favor to me — think of that !”” was Mar- 
tin’s contribution. 

‘¢ Let me see — where were you born, Mr. Eden?” the 
cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention. 

“ He doesn’t take notes,” said Brissenden. “He re- 
members it all.” 

“Thatissufficientforme.” Thecubwastrying aottolook 
worried. ‘No decent reporter needs to bother with notes.” 

“That was sufficient — for last night.” But Bris- 
senden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his 
attitude abruptly. ‘ Martin, if you don’t pokes him, I'll do 
it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment.” 

“ How will a spanking do?” Martin asked. 

Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head. 

The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the 
bed with the cub face downward across his knees. 

‘S Now don’t bite,’ Martin warned, “or else I'll have to 
punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a 
pretty face.” 

His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and 
fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and 
cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissen- 
den looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and 
gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, ‘ Here, just let me 
swat him once.” 

“Sorry my hand played out,” Martin said, when at last 
he desisted. ‘It is quite numb.” 

He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed. 

“T’ll have you arrested for this,” he snarled, tears of 
boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. “I'll 
make you sweat for this. You'll see.’ 

“The pretty thing,” Martin remarked. “He doesn’t 
realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It 
is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies 
about one’s fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he 
doesn’t know it.” 

‘“‘ He has to come to us to be told,” Brissenden filled in 
a pause. 

“Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My 


ye) 


MARTIN EDEN OOO 


grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The 
worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until 
he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a 
first-class scoundrel.” 

“But there is yet time,” quoth Brissenden. ‘“ Who knows 
but what you may prove the humble instrument to save 
him. Why didn’t you let me swat him just once? I’d 
like to have had a hand in it.” 

“Pll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big 
brutes,” sobbed the erring soul. 

“No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak.” Martin 
shook his head lugubriously. “I’m afraid ’ve numbed 
my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He 
will become eventually a very great and successful news- , / 
paper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make * 
him great.” 

With that the cub passed out the door, in trepidation to 
the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back 
with the bottle he still clutched. | 

In the next morning’s paper Martin learned a great deal 
more about himself that was new to him. “We are the 
sworn enemies of society,” he found himself quoted as 
saying in a column interview. “ No, we are not anarchists 
but socialists.” When the reporter pointed out to him 
that there seemed little difference between the two schools, 
Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. 
His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and 
various other signs of degeneration were described. Es- 
pecially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery 
gleams in his blood-shot eyes. 

He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen 
in the City Hall,Park, and that among the anarchists and 
agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he 
drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary 
speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor 
little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the 
death’s-head tramp who kept him company and who looked 
as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary 
confinement in some fortress dungeon. 


336 } MARTIN EDEN 


The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around 
and nosed out Martin’s family history, and procured a 
photograph of Higginbotham’s Cash Store with Bernard 
Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That gen- 
tleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified business 
man who had no patience with his brother-in-law’s social- 
istic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, 
whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for- 
nothing who wouldn’t take a job when it was offered to 
him and who would go to jailyet. Hermann von Schmidt, 
Marian’s husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had 
called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated 
him. “He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to 
that good and quick,’ Von Schmidt had said to the re- 
porter. “He knows better than to come bumming around 
here. A man who won’t work is no good, take that from 
ie. 

This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden 
looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not 
console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task 
to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he 
must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he 
would make the most of it to break off the engagement. 
How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The 
afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened 
it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at 
the open door when he had received it from the postman. 
As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for 
the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. 
He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he 
had even reached for the materials with which to roll a 
cigarette. 

It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches 
of anger init. But all the way through, from the first 
sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and 
disappointment. She had expected better of him. She 
had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that 
her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to en- 
able him to live seriously and decently. And now her 


MARTIN EDEN f oot 


father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded 
that the engagement be broken. That they were justified 
in this she could not but admit. Their relation could 
never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the 
first. But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and 
it was a bitter one to Martin. “If only you had settled 
down to some position and attempted to make something 
of yourself,” she wrote. “But it was not to be. Your 
past life had been too wild and irregular. I can under- 
stand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only 
according to your nature and your early training. So I 
do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was 
simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, 
we were not made for each other, and we should both be 
happy because it was discovered not too late.” .. . “There 
is no use trying to see me,” she said toward the last. “It 
would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for 
my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great 
pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone 
for it.” 

He read it through to the end, carefully, a second 
time, then sat down and replied. He outlined the re- 
marks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing 
out that they were in all ways the converse of what the 
newspaper had put in his mouth. ‘Toward the end of the 
letter he was God’s own lover pleading passionately for 
love. ‘Please answer,” he said, “and in your answer 
you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me? 
That is all —the answer to that one question.” 

But no answer came the next day, nor the next. ‘ Over- 
due” lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap 
of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. 
For the first time Martin’s glorious sleep was interrupted 
by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. 
Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned 
es by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden 
lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though 
Martin was with him often, at did not worry him with 
his troubles. 

Z 


338 " ‘MARTIN EDEN 


For Martin’s troubles were many. ‘The aftermath of 
the cub reporter’s deed was even wider than Martin had 
anticipated. The Portuguese grocer refused him further 
credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and 
proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and 
refused further dealings with him —carrying his patriot- 
ism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin’s account 
and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it. The talk 
in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and in- 
dignation against Martin ran high. No one would have 
anything to do with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was 
dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The 
children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of 
the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and 
_from safe distances they called him “hobo” and “ bum.” 
The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fight- 
ing more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black 
eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day 
and added to Maria’s perplexities and troubles. 

Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oak- 
land, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise 
— that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for 
having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that 
he had forbidden him the house. 

“Why don’t you go away, Martin?” Gertrude had 
begged. “Go away and get a job somewhere and steady 
down. Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can 
come back.” 

Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How 
could he explain? He was appalled at the awful intellec- 
tual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He 
could never cross it and explain to them his position, — the 
Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were 
not words enough in the English language, nor in any 
language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to 
them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, 
was to getajob. That was their first word and their last. 
It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! 
Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his 


MARTIN EDEN fai 009 


sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the 
strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. 
A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell 
down and worshipped. 

He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him 
money, though he knew that within the day he would 
have to make a trip to the pawnbroker. 

‘Don’t come near Bernard now,” she admonished him. 
* After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you 
want to, you can get the job of drivin’ delivery-wagon for 
him. Any time you want me, just send for me an’ [ll 
come. Don’t forget.” 

She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of 
sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body 
and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the Nietzschean 
edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in 
the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly 
-satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. 
And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, 
that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely 
at the paradox. A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow 
his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sen- 
timent or emotion that strayed along—ay, to be shaken 
by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for 
his sister really was. The true noble men were above 
pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been gen- 
erated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and 


were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded “ 


miserables and weaklings. 


CHAPTER XL 


“OVERDUE” still continued to lie forgotten on the table. 
Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the 
table. Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was 
Brissenden’s ‘“‘ Ephemera.” His bicycle and black suit 
were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were 
once more worrying about the rent. But such things no 
longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, 
and until that was found his life must stand still. 

After several weeks, what he had been waiting for 
happened. He met Ruth on the street. It was true, she 
was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true 
that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted 
to wave him aside. 

“Tf you interfere with my sister, Pll call an officer,” 
Norman threatened. “She does not wish to speak with 
you, and your insistence is insult.” 

“‘ [f you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then 
you'll get your name in the papers,” Martin answered 
grimly. ‘“ And now, get out of my way and get the 
officer if you want to. I’m going to talk with Ruth. 

‘‘T want to have it from your own lips,” he said to her. 

She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked 
inquiringly. 

‘The question I asked in my letter,” he prompted. 

Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin 
checked him with a swift look. 

She shook her head. 

“Ts all this of your own free will?” he demanded. 

“Tt is.” She spoke in a low, firm voice and with delib- 
eration. “It is of my own free will. You have dis- 
graced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. 
They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can 

340 


MARTIN EDEN 34] 


tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never 
wish to see you again.’ 

“Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely 
such things are not stronger than love! I can only 
believe that you never loved me.” 

A blush drove the pallor from her face. 

“ After what has passed?” she said faintly. ‘ Martin, 
you do not know what you are saying. I am not 
common.’ 

“You see, she doesn’t want to have anything to do with 
you,” Norman blurted out, starting on with her. 

Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling uncon- 
sciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown 
papers that were not there. 

It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not 
until he went up the steps and entered his room that he 
knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on the 
edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened 
somnambulist. He noticed “Overdue” lying on the 
table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. 
There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward com- 
pleteness. Here was something undone. It had been de- 
ferred against the completion of something else. Now that 
something else had been finished, and he would apply him- 
self to this task until it was finished. What he would do 
next he did not know. All that he did know was that a 
climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had 
been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman- 
like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He 
would soon enough find out what it held in store for him. 
Whatever it ib it did not matter. Nothing seemed to 
matter. 

For five yi he toiled on at ‘ Overdue,” going no- 
where, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely. On the 
morning of the sixth day the postman brought him 
a thin letter from the editor of Zhe Parthenon. A 
elance told him that “Ephemera” was accepted. ‘“ We 
have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce,” the 
editor went on to say, “and he has reported so favorably 


Ri 


342 ene MARTIN EDEN 


upon it that we cannot let it go. Asan earnest of our 
pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we 
have set it for the August number, our July number be- 
ing already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and 
our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return 
mail his photograph and biographical data. If our hono- 
rarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and 
state what you consider a fair price.” 

Since the honorarium they had offered was three hun- 
dred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while 
to telegraph. Then, too, there was Brissenden’s consent 
to be gained. Well, he had been right, after all. Here 
was one magazine editor who knew real poetry when he 
saw it. And the price was splendid, even though it was 
for the poem of a century. As for Cartwright Bruce, 
Martin knew that he was the one critic for whose opin- 
ions Brissenden had any respect. 

Martin rode down town on an electric car, and as he 
watched the houses and cross-streets slipping by he was 
aware of a regret that he was not more elated over his 
friend’s success and over his own signal victory. The 
one critic in the United States had pronounced favorably 
on the poem, while his own contention that good stuff 
could find its way into the magazines had proved correct. 
But enthusiasm had lost its spring in him, and he found 
that he was more anxious to see Brissenden than he was 
to carry the good news. ‘The acceptance of The Parthe- 
non had recalled to him that during his five days’ devo- 
tion to “Overdue” he had not heard from Brissenden 
nor even thought about him. For the first time Martin 
realized the daze he had been in, and he felt shame for 
having forgotten his friend. But even the shame did not 
burn very sharply. He was numb to emotions of any 
sort save the artistic ones concerned in the writing of 
“ Overdue.” So far as other affairs were concerned, he 
had been in a trance. For that matter, he was still in 
a trance. All this life through which the electric car 
whirred seemed remote and unreal, and he would have 
experienced little interest and less shock if the great 


MARTIN EDEN 343 


stone steeple of the church he passed. had suddenly 
crumbled to mortar-dust upon his head. 

At the hotel he hurried up to Brissenden’s room, and 
hurried down again. ‘The room was empty. All lug- 
gage was gone. 

“Did Mr. Brissenden leave any address?” he asked 
the clerk, who looked at him curiously for a moment. 

“ Haven’t you heard ?” he asked. 

Martin shook his head. 

“Why, the papers were full of it. He was found dead 
in bed. Suicide. Shot himself through the head.” 

“Ts he buried yet?” Martin seemed to hear his voice, 
like some one else’s voice, from a long way off, asking the 
question. 

““No. The body was shipped East after the inquest. 
Lawyers engaged by his people saw to the arrange- 
ments.” 

“They were quick about it, I must say,” Martin com- 
mented. 

“ Oh, I don’t know. It happened five days ago.” 

“ Hive days ago?” 

“ Yes, five days ago.” 

*“ Oh,” Martin said as he turned and went out. 

At the corner he stepped into the Western Union and 
sent a telegram to The Parthenon, advising them to 
proceed with the publication of the poem. He had in his 
pocket but five cents with which to pay his carfare home, 
so he sent the message collect. 

Once in his room, he resumed his writing. The days 
and nights came and went, and he sat at his table and 
wrote on. He went nowhere, save to the pawnbroker, 
took no exercise,‘and ate methodically when he was hungry 
and had something to cook, and just as methodically went 
without when he had nothing to cook. Composed as the 
story was, in advance, chapter by chapter, he nevertheless 
saw and developed an opening that increased the power 
of it, though it necessitated twenty thousand additional 
words. It was not that there was any vital need that the 
thing should be well done, but that his artistic canons 


044 MARTIN EDEN 


compelled him to do it well. He worked on in the daze, 
strangely detached from the world around him, feeling 
like a familiar ghost among these literary trappings of his 
former life. He remembered that some one had said that 
a ghost was the spirit of a man who was dead and who 
did not have sense enough to know it; and he paused for 
the moment to wonder if he were really dead and unaware 
of it. 

Came the day when “ Overdue” was finished. The 
agent of the type-writer firm had come for the machine, 
and he sat on the bed while Martin, on the one chair, typed 
the last pages of the final chapter. ‘ Finis,” he wrote, in 
capitals, at the end, and to him it was indeed finis. He 
watched the type-writer carried out the door with a feeling 
of relief, then went over and lay down on the bed. He 
was faint from hunger. Food had not passed his lips in 
thirty-six hours, but he did not think about it. He lay 
on his back, with closed eyes, and did not think at all, 
while the daze or stupor slowly welled up, saturating his 
consciousness. Halfin delirium, he began muttering aloud 
the lines of an anonymous poem Brissenden had been fond 
of quoting to him. Maria, listening anxiously outside his 
door, was perturbed by his monotonous utterance. The 
words in themselves were not significant to her, but the 
fact that he was saying them was. ‘I have done,” was 
the burden of the poem. 


“<¢T have done — 

Put by the lute. 

Song and singing soon are over 
As the airy shades that hover 
In among the purple clover. 
I have done — 

Put by the lute. 

Once I sang as early thrushes 
Sing among the dewy bushes; 
Now I’m mute. 

I am like a weary linnet, 

For my throat has no song in it ; 
I have had my singing minute. 
I have done. 

Put by the lute.’ ” 


MARTIN EDEN 345 


Maria could stand it no longer, and hurried away to the 
stove, where she filled a quart-bowl with soup, putting 
into it the lion’s share of chopped meat and vegetables 
which her ladle scraped from the bottom of the pot. 
Martin roused himself and sat up and began to eat, be- 
tween spoonfuls reassuring Maria that he had not been 
talking in his sleep and that he did not have any fever. 

After she left him he sat drearily, with drooping 
shoulders, on the edge of the bed, gazing about him with 
lack-lustre eyes that saw nothing until the torn wrapper 
of a magazine, which had come in the morning’s mail and 
which lay unopened, shot a gleam of light into his dark- 
ened brain. It is The Parthenon, he thought, the August 
Parthenon, and it must contain “ Ephemera.” If only 
Brissenden were here to see! 

He was turning the pages of the magazine, when sud- 
denly he stopped. “Ephemera” had been featured, with 
gorgeous head-piece and Beardsley-like margin decorations. 
On one side of the head-piece was Brissenden’s photograph, 
on the other side was the photograph of Sir John Value, 
the British Ambassador. A preliminary editorial note 
quoted Sir John Value as saying that there were no poets 
in America, and the publication of “ Ephemera” was The 
Parthenon's. “There, take that, Sir John Value!” 
Cartwright Bruce was described as the greatest critic 
in America, and he was quoted as saying that ‘ Ephemera” 
was the greatest poem ever written in America. And 
finally, the editor’s foreword ended with: ‘“‘We have not 
yet made up our minds entirely as to the merits of 
‘“‘ Hphemera ”’ ; perhaps we shall never be able to do so. 
But we have read it often, wondering at the words and 
their arrangement, wondering where Mr. Brissenden got 
them, and how he could fasten them together.” Then 
followed the poem. 

“Pretty good thing you died, Briss, old man,” Martin 
murmured, letting the magazine slip between his knees to 
the floor. 

The cheapness and vulgarity of it was nauseating, and 
Martin noted apathetically that he was not nauseated 


346 MARTIN EDEN 


very much. He wished he could get angry, but did not 
have energy enough to try. Hewas too numb. His blood 
was too congealed to accelerate to the swift tidal flow of 
indignation. After all, what did it matter? It was ona 
par with all the rest that Brissenden had condemned in 
bourgeois society. 

‘Poor Briss,” Martin communed; “he would never 
have forgiven me.” 

Rousing himself with an effort, he possessed himself of 
a box which had once contained type-writer paper. Going 
through its contents, he drew forth eleven poems which 
his friend had written. ‘These he tore lengthwise and 
crosswise and dropped into the waste basket. He did it 
languidly, and, when he had finished, sat on the edge of 
the bed staring blankly before him. 

How long he sat there he did not know, until, suddenly, 
across his sightless vision he saw form a long horizontal 
line of white. It was curious. But as he watched it grow 
in definiteness he saw that it was a coral reef smoking in 
the white Pacific surges. Next, in the line of breakers, 
he made out a small canoe, an outrigger canoe. In the 
stern he saw a young bronzed god in scarlet hip-cloth, 
dipping a flashing paddle. He recognized him. He was 
Moti, the youngest son of Tati, the chief, and this was 
Tahiti, and beyond that smoking reef lay the sweet land 
of Papara and the chief’s grass house by the river’s mouth. 
It was the end of the day, and Moti was coming home 
from the fishing. He was waiting for the rush of a big 
breaker whereon to jump the reef. Then he saw himself, 
sitting forward in the canoe as he had often sat in the 
past, dipping a paddle that waited Moti’s word to dig in © 
like mad when the turquoise wall of the great breaker rose 
behind them. Next, he was no longer an onlooker but 
was himself in the canoe, Moti was crying out, they were 
both thrusting hard with their paddles, racing on the 
steep face of the flying turquoise. Under the bow the 
water was hissing as from a steam jet, the air was filled 
with driven spray, there was a rush and rumble and long- 
echoing roar, and the canoe floated on the placid water of 


Sa 


MARTIN EDEN 347 


the lagoon. Moti laughed and shook the salt water from 
his eyes, and together they paddled in to’ the pounded- 
coral beach where Tati’s grass walls through the cocoanut- 
palms showed golden in the setting sun. 

The picture faded, and before his eyes stretched the 
disorder of his squalid room. He strove in vain to see 
Tahiti again. He knew there was singing among the 
trees and that the maidens were dancing in the moon- 
light, but he could not see them. He could see only the 
littered writing-table, the empty space where the type- 
writer had stood, and the unwashed window-pane. He 
closed his eyes with a groan, and slept. 


CHAPTER XLI 


HE slept heavily all night, and did not stir until aroused 
by the postman on his morning round. Martin felt tired 
and passive, and went through his letters aimlessly. One 
thin envelope, from a robber magazine, contained a check 
for twenty-two dollars. He had been dunning for it for 
a year and a half. He noted its amount apathetically. 
The old-time thrill at receiving a publisher’s check was 
gone. Unlike his earlier checks, this one was not preg- 
nant with promise of great things to come. To him it 
was a check for twenty-two dollars, that was all, and it 
would buy him something to eat. 

Another check was in the same mail, sent from a New 
York weekly in payment for some humorous verse which 
had been accepted months before. It was for ten dollars. 
An idea came to him, which he calmly considered. He 
did not know what he was going to do, and he felt in no 
hurry to do anything. In the meantime he must live. 
Also he owed numerous debts. Would it not be a paying 
investment to put stamps on the huge pile of manuscripts 
under the table and start them on their travels again ? 
One or two of them might be accepted. That would help 
him to live. He decided on the investment, and, after he 
had cashed the checks at the bank down in Oakland, he 
bought ten dollars’ worth of postage stamps. The thought 
of going home to cook breakfast in his stuffy little room 
was repulsive to him. For the first time he refused to 
consider his debts. He knew that in his room he could 
manufacture a substantial breakfast at a cost of from fif- 
teen totwenty cents. But, instead, he went into the Forum 
Café and ordered a breakfast that cost two dollars. He 
tipped the waiter a quarter, and spent fifty cents for a 
package of Egyptian cigarettes. It was the first time he 

348 


MARTIN EDEN 049 


had smoked since Ruth had asked him to stop. But he 
could see now no reason why he should not, and besides, 
he wanted to smoke. And what did the money matter? 
For five cents he could have bought a package of Durham 
and brown papers and rolled forty cigarettes — but what 


of it? Money had no meaning to him now except what it » 


would immediately buy. He was chartless and rudder- * 
less, and he had no port to make, while drifting involved 
the least living, and it was living that hurt. 

The days slipped along, and he slept eight hours regu- 
larly every night. Though now, while waiting for more 
checks, he ate in the Japanese restaurants where meals 
were served for ten cents, his wasted body filled out, as 
did the hollows in his cheeks. He no longer abused him- 
self with short sleep, overwork, and overstudy. He 
wrote nothing, and the books were closed. He walked 
much, out in the hills, and loafed long hours in the quiet 
parks. He had no friends nor acquaintances, nor did he 
make any. He had no inclination. He was waiting for 
some impulse, from he knew not where, to put his stopped 
life into motion again. In the meantime his life remained 
run down, planless, and empty and idle. 

Once he made a trip to San Francisco to look up the 
“real dirt.” But at the last moment, as he stepped into the 
upstairs entrance, he recoiled and turned and fled through 
the swarming ghetto. He was frightened at the thought 
of hearing philosophy discussed, and he fled furtively, for 
fear that some one of the “real dirt” might chance along 
and recognize him. 

Sometimes he glanced over the magazines and news- 
papers to see how “ Ephemera” was being maltreated. 
It had made a hit. But what a hit! Everybody had 
read it, and everybody was discussing whether or not it 
was really poetry. ‘The local papers had taken it up, and 
daily there appeared columns of learned criticisms, facetious 
editorials, and serious letters from subscribers. Helen 
Della Delmar (proclaimed with a flourish of trumpets and 
rolling of tomtoms to be the greatest woman poet in the 
United States) denied Brissenden a seat beside her on 


300 MARTIN EDEN 


Pegasus and wrote voluminous letters to the public, 
proving that he was no poet. 

The Parthenon came out in its next number patting 
itself on the back for the stir it had made, sneering at 
Sir John Value, and exploiting Brissenden’s death with 
ruthless commercialism. A newspaper with a sworn 
circulation of half a million published an original and 
spontaneous poem by Helen Della Delmar, in which she 
gibed and sneered at Brissenden. Also, she was guilty 
of a second poem, in which she parodied him. 

Martin had many times to be glad that Brissenden was 
dead. He had hated the crowd so, and here all that was 
finest and most sacred of him had been thrown to the 
crowd. Daily the vivisection of Beauty went on. Every 
nincompoop in the land rushed into free print, floating 
their wizened little egos into the public eye on the surge 
of Brissenden’s greatness. Quoth one paper: “ We have 
received a letter from a gentleman who wrote a poem just 
like it, only better, some time ago.” Another paper, in 
deadly seriousness, reproving Helen Della Delmar for her 
parody, said: ‘“ But unquestionably Miss Delmar wrote it 
in a moment of badinage and not quite with the respect 
that one great poet should show to another and perhaps to 
the greatest. However, whether Miss Delmar be jealous 
or not of the man who invented ‘ Ephemera,’ it is certain 
that she, like thousands of others, is fascinated by his 
work, and that the day may come when she will try to 
write lines like his.” 

Ministers began to preach sermons against “ Ephemera,” 
and one, who too stoutly stood for much of its content, 
was expelled for heresy. The great poem contributed 
to the gayety of the world. The comic verse-writers and 
the cartoonists took hold of it with screaming laughter, 
and in the personal columns of society weeklies jokes were 
perpetrated on it to the effect that Charley Frensham told 
Archie Jennings, in confidence, that five lines of 
“Ephemera” would drive a man to beat a cripple, and 
that ten lines would send him to the bottom of the river. 

Martin did not laugh; nor did he grit his teeth in 


MARTIN EDEN 351 


anger. The effect produced upon him was one of great 
sadness. In the crash of his whole world} with love on 
the pinnacle, the crash of magazinedom and the dear 
public was a small crash indeed. Brissenden had been 
wholly right in his judgment of the magazines, and he, 
Martin, had spent arduous and futile years in order to find 
it out for himself. The magazines were all Brissenden 
had said they were and more. Well, he was done, he 
solaced himself. He had hitched his wagon to a star and 
been landed in a pestiferousmarsh. The visions of Tahiti 
—clean, sweet Tahiti — were coming to him more fre- 
quently. And there were the low Paumotus, and the 
high Marquesas; he saw himself often, now, on board 
trading schooners or frail little cutters, shpping out at 
dawn through the reef at Papeete and beginning the long 
beat through the pearl-atolls to Nukahiva and the Bay of 
Taiohe, where Tamari, he knew, would kill a pig in 
honor of his coming, and where Tamari’s flower-garlanded 
daughters would seize his hands and with song and 
laughter garland him with flowers. The South Seas were 
calling, and he knew that sooner or later he would 
answer the call. 

In the meantime he drifted, resting and recuperating 
after the long traverse he had made through the realm 
of knowledge. When The Parthenon check of three hun- 
dred and fifty dollars was forwarded to him, he turned it 
over to the local lawyer who had attended to Brissenden’s 
affairs for his family. Martin took a receipt for the check, 
and at the same time gave a note for the hundred dollars 
Brissenden had let him have. 

The time was not long when Martin ceased patronizing 
the Japanese restaurants. At the very moment when he 


had abandoned the fight, the tide turned. But it had |. 
turned too late. Without a thrill he opened a thin en- ~ 


velope from The Millennium, scanned the face of a 
check that represented three hundred dollars, and noted 
that it was the payment on acceptance for “ Adventure.” 

Every debt he owed in the world, including the pawnshop 
with its usurious interest, amounted to less than a hun- 


ool MARTIN EDEN 


dred dollars. And when he had paid everything, and 
lifted the hundred-dollar note with Brissenden’s lawyer, 
he still had over a hundred dollars in pocket. He ordered a 
suit of clothes from the tailor and ate his meals in the best 
cafés in town. He still slept in his little room at Maria’s, 
but the sight of his new clothes caused the neighborhood 
children to cease from calling him “hobo” and “ tramp” 
from the roofs of woodsheds and over back fences. 

¢ Wiki-Wiki,” his Hawaiian short story, was bought 
by Warren's Monthly for two hundred and fifty dol- 
lars. Zhe Northern Review took his essay, “The 
Cradle of Beauty,” and Mackintosh’s Magazine took 
“The Palmist”—the poem he had written to Marian. 
The editors and readers were back from their summer 
vacations, and manuscripts were being handled quickly. 
But Martin could not puzzle out what strange whim ani- 
mated them to this general acceptance of the things they 
had persistently rejected for two years. Nothing of his 
had been published. He was not known anywhere out- 
side of Oakland, and in Oakland, with the few who 
» thought they knew him, he was notorious as a red-shirt 
and a socialist. So there was no explaining this sudden 
acceptability of his wares. It was sheer jugglery of fate. 

After it had been refused by a number of magazines, 
he had taken Brissenden’s rejected advice and started 
“The Shame of the Sun” on the round of publishers. 
After several refusals, Singletree, Darnley & Co. accepted 
it, promising fall publication. When Martin asked for 
an advance on royalties, they wrote that such was not 


their custom, that books of that nature rarely paid for 


themselves, and that they doubted if his book would sell 
a thousand copies. Martin figured what the book would 
earn him on such a sale. Retailed at a dollar, on a 
royalty of fifteen per cent, it would bring him one hun- 
dred and fifty dollars. He decided that if he had it to do 
over again he would confine himself to fiction. ‘* Adven- 
ture,’ one-fourth as long, had brought him twice as much 
from The Millennium. That newspaper paragraph he 
had read so long ago had been true, after all. ‘The first- 


MARTIN EDEN 353 


class magazines did not pay on acceptance, and they paid 
well. Not two cents a word, but four cents a word, 
had The Millennium paid him. And, furthermore, they 
bought good stuff, too, for were they not buying his? 
This last thought he accompanied with a grin. 

He wrote to Singletree, Darnley & Co., offering to sell 
out his rights in “The Shame of the Sun” for a hundred 
dollars, but they did not care to take the risk. In the 
meantime he was not in need of money, for several of his 
later stories had been accepted and paid for. He actually 
opened a bank account, where, without a debt in the 
world, he had several hundred dollars to his credit. 
“Overdue,” after having been declined by a number of 
magazines, came to rest at the Meredith-Lowell Company. 
Martin remembered the five dollars Gertrude had given 
him, and his resolve to return it to her a hundred times 
over; so he wrote for an advance on royalties of five hun- 
dred dollars. ‘To his surprise a check for that amount, 
accompanied by a contract, came by return mail. He 
cashed the check into five-dollar gold pieces and tele- 
phoned Gertrude that he wanted to see her. 

She arrived at the house panting and short of breath 
from the haste she had made. Apprehensive of trouble, 
she had stuffed the few dollars she possessed into her hand- 
satchel; and so sure was she that disaster had overtaken 
her brother, that she stumbled forward, sobbing, into his 
arms, at the same time thrusting the satchel mutely at him. 

‘« ’d have come myself,” he said. ‘“ But I didn’t want 
arow with Mr. Higginbotham, and that is what would 
have surely happened.” 

“ Hell be all right after a time,” she assured him, while 
she wondered what the trouble was that Martin was in. 
“ But you'd best get a job first an’ steady down. Bernard 
does like to see a man at honest work. ‘That stuff in the 
newspapers broke ’m all up. I never saw ’m so mad 
before.” | 

“T’m not going to get a job,” Martin said with a smile. 
« And you can tell him so from me. I don’t need a job, 
and there’s the proof of it.” 

2A 


354 MARTIN EDEN 


He emptied the hundred gold pieces into her lap ina 
glinting, tinkling stream. 

‘“ You remember that fiver you gave me the time I 
didn’t have carfare? Well, there it is, with ninety-nine 
brothers of different ages but all of the same size.” 

If Gertrude had been frightened when she arrived, she 
was now ina panic of fear. Her fear was such that it was 
certitude. She was not suspicious. She was convinced. 
She looked at Martin in horror, and her heavy limbs shrank 
under the golden stream as though it were burning her. 

“Tt’s yours,” he laughed. 

She burst into tears, and began to moan, “ My poor boy, 
my poor boy!” 

He was puzzled fora moment. Then he divined the 
cause of her agitation and handed her the Meredith-Lowell 
letter which had accompanied the check. She stumbled 
through it, pausing now and again to wipe her eyes, and 
when she had finished, said: — 

* An’ does it mean that you come by the money hon- 
estly ?” 

“More honestly than if ('d won it in a lottery. I 
earned it.” 

Slowly faith came back to her, and she reread the letter 
carefully. It took him long to explain to her the nature 
of the transaction which had put the money into his pos- 
session, and longer still to get her to understand that the 
money was really hers and that he did not need it. 

“ Tl] put it in the bank for you,” she said finally. 

“ You'll do nothing of the sort. It’s yours, to do with 
as you please, and if you won’t take it, Pll give it to Maria. — 
She’ll know what to do with it. Id suggest, though, that 
you hire a servant and take a good long rest.” 

“Tm goin’ to tell Bernard all about it,” she announced, 
when she was leaving. 

Martin winced, then grinned. 

“Yes, do,” he said. ‘“ And then, maybe, he’ll invite me 
to dinner again.” 

“ Yes, he will — I’m sure he will!” she exclaimed fer- 
vently, as she drew him to her and kissed and hugged him. 


CHAPTER XLII 


OnE day Martin became aware that he waslonely. He 
was healthy and strong, and had nothing to do. The ces- 
sation from writing and studying, the death of Brissenden, 
and the estrangement from Ruth had made a big hole in 
his life; and his life refused to be pinned down to good 
living in cafés and the smoking of Egyptian cigarettes. 
It was true the South Seas were calling to him, but he had 
a feeling that the game was not yet played out in the 
United States. Two books were soon to be published, and 
he had more books that might find publication. Money 
could be made out of them, and he would wait and take a 
sackful of it into the South Seas. He knew a valley and 
a bay in the Marquesas that he could buy for a thousand 
Chili dollars. The valley ran from the horseshoe, land- 
locked bay to the tops of the dizzy, cloud-capped peaks 
and contained perhaps'ten thousand acres. It was filled 
with tropical fruits, wild chickens, and wild pigs, with an 
occasional herd of wild cattle, while high up among the 
peaks were herds of wild goats harried by packs of wild 
dogs. The whole place was wild. Not a human lived in 
it. And he could buy it and the bay for a thousand Chili 
dollars. 

The bay, as he remembered it, was magnificent, with 
water deep enough to accommodate the largest vessel afloat, 
and so safe that the South Pacific Directory recommended 
it as the best careening place for ships for hundreds of 
miles around. He would buy a schooner — one of those 
yacht-like, coppered crafts that sailed like witches — and 
go trading copra and pearling among the islands. He 
would make the valley and the bay his headquarters. He 
would build a patriarchal grass house like Tati’s, and have 
it and the valley and the schooner filled with dark-skinned 
servitors. He would entertain there the factor of Taiohe, 

359 


306 MARTIN EDEN 


captains of wandering traders, and all the best of the South 
Pacific riffraff. He would keep open house and entertain 
like a prince. And he would forget the books he had 
opened and the world that had proved an illusion. 

To do all this he must wait in California to fill the sack 
with money. Already it was beginning to flow in. If 
one of the books made a strike, it might enable him to sell 
the whole heap of manuscripts. Also he could collect the 
stories and the poems into books, and make sure of the 
valley and the bay and the schooner. He would never 
write again. Upon that he was resolved. But in the 
meantime, awaiting the publication of the books, he must 
do something more than live dazed and stupid in the sort 
of uncaring trance into which he had fallen. 

He noted, one Sunday morning, that the Bricklayers’ 
Picnic took place that day at Shell Mound Park, and to 
Shell Mound Park he went. He had been to the working- 
class picnics too often in his earlier life not to know what 
they were like, and as he entered the park he experienced 
a recrudescence of all the old sensations. After all, they 
were his kind, these working people. He had been born 
among them, he had lived among them, and though he 
had strayed for a time, it was well to come back among 
them. | 

“Tf it ain’t Mart!” he heard some one say, and the next 
moment a hearty hand was on his shoulder. ‘“ Where you 
ben all the time ? Off to sea? Come on an’ have a drink.” 

It was the old crowd in which he found himself — the 
old crowd, with here and there a gap, and here and there 
anew face. ‘The fellows were not bricklayers, but, as in 
the old days, they attended all Sunday picnics for the 
dancing, and the fighting, and the fun. Martin drank 
. with them, and began to feel really human once more. He 
“was a fool to have ever left them, he thought; and he was 
very certain that his sum of happiness would have been 
greater had he remained with them and let alone the books 
and the people who sat in the high places. Yet the beer 
seemed not so good as of yore. It didn’t taste as it used 
to taste. Brissenden had spoiled him for steam beer, he 


MARTIN EDEN ; oot 


concluded, and wondered if, after all, the books had spoiled 
him for companionship with these friends of his youth. 
He resolved that he would not be so spoiled, and he went 
on to the dancing pavilion. Jimmy, the plumber, he met 
there, in the company of a tall, blond girl who promptly 
forsook him for Martin. 

‘“‘ Gee, it’s like old times,” Jimmy explained to the gang 

that gave him the laugh as Martin and the blonde whirled 
away in a waltz. “ An’ [ don’t give a rap. [T’m too 
damned glad to see ’’m back. Watch ’m waltz, eh? It’s 
like silk. Who'd blame any girl?” 
. But Martin restored the blonde to Jimmy, and the three 
of them, with half a dozen friends, watched the revolving 
couples and laughed and joked with one another. LEvery- 
body was glad to see Martin back. No book of his had 
been published ; he carried no fictitious value in their eyes. 
They liked him for himself. He felt like a prince returned 
from exile, and his lonely heart burgeoned in the geniality 
in which it bathed. He made a mad day of it, and was 
at his best. Also, he had money in his pockets, and, as 
in the old days when he returned from sea with a pay-day, 
he made the money fly. 

Once, on the dancing-floor, he saw Lizzie Connolly go 
by in the arms of a young workingman; and, later, when 
he made the round of the pavilion, he came upon her sit- 
ting by a refreshment table. Surprise and greetings over, 
he led her away into the grounds, where they could talk 
without shouting down the music. From the instant he 
spoke to her, she was his. He knew it. She showed it in 
the proud humility of her eyes, in every caressing move- 
ment of her proud*y earried body, and in the way she 
hung upon his speech. She was not the young girl as he 
had known her. She was a woman, now, and Martin 
noted that her wild, defiant beauty had improved, losing 
none of its wildness, while the defiance and the fire seemed 
more in control. ‘“ A beauty, a perfect beauty,” he mur- 
mured admiringly under his breath. And he knew she 
was his, that all he had to do was to say ‘“ Come,” and 
she would go with him over the world wherever he led. 


308 MARTIN EDEN 


Even as the thought flashed through his brain he re- 
ceived a heavy blow on the side of his head that nearly 
knocked him down. It was a man’s fist, directed by a man 
so angry and in such haste that the fist had missed the 
jaw for which it was aimed. Martin turned as he stag- 
gered, and saw the fist coming at him in a wild swing. 
Quite as a matter of course he ducked, and the fist flew 
harmlessly past, pivoting the man who had driven it. 
Martin hooked with his left, landing on the pivoting man 
with the weight of his body behind the blow. The man 
went to the ground sidewise, leaped to his feet, and made a 
mad rush. Martin saw his passion-distorted face and won- 
dered what could be the cause of the fellow’s anger. But 
while he wondered, he shot in a straight left, the weight of 
his body behind the blow. The man went over backward 
and fell in a crumpled heap. Jimmy and others of the 
gang were running toward them. 

Martin was thrilling all over. This was the old days 
with a vengeance, with their dancing, and their fighting, 
and their fun. While he kept a wary eye on his antag- 
onist, he glanced at Lizzie. Usually the girls screamed 
when the fellows got to scrapping, but she had not 
screamed. She was looking on with bated breath, lean- 
ing slightly forward, so keen was her interest, one hand 
pressed to her breast, her cheek flushed, and in her eyes 
a great and amazed admiration. 

The man had gained his feet and was struggling to 
escape the restraining arms that were laid on him. 

“She was waitin’ for me to come back!” he was pro- 
claiming to all and sundry. “She was waitin’ for me to 
come back, an’ then that fresh guy comes buttin’ in. Let 
goo’ me, I tell yeh. I’m goin’ to fix ’m.” 

“ What’s eatin’ yer?” Jimmy was demanding, as he 
helped hold the young fellow back. “That guy’s Mart 
Eden. He’s nifty with his mits, lemme tell you that, an’ 
he’ll eat you alive if you monkey with ’m.” 

_ “He can’t steal her on me that way,” the other inter- 
jected. 

“He licked the Flyin’ Dutchman, an’ you know him,” 


MARTIN EDEN 309 


Jimmy went on expostulating. ‘An’ he did it in five 
rounds. You couldn’t last a minute against him. See?” 
This information seemed to have a mollifying effect, and 
the irate young man favored Martin with a measuring stare. 
‘*¢‘ He don’t look it,” he sneered ; but the sneer was with- 
out passion. 

“‘That’s what the Flyin’ Dutchman thought,” Jimmy 
assured him. ‘Come on, now, let’s get outa this. There’s 
lots of other girls. Come on.” 

The young fellow allowed himself to be led away toward 
the pavilion, and the gang followed after him. 

“Who is he?” Martin asked Lizzie. “And what’s it all 
about, anyway?” 

Already the zest of combat, which of old had been so 
keen and lasting, had died down, and he discovered that 
he was self-analytical, too much so to live, single heart 
and single hand, so primitive an existence. 

Lizzie tossed her head. 

“‘Qh, he’s nobody,” she said. “ He’s just ben keepin’ 
company with me. 

“T had to, you see,” she explained after a pause. “I 
was gettin’ pretty lonesome. But I never forgot.” Her 
voice sank lower, and she looked straight before her. ‘Id 
throw ’m down for you any time.” 

Martin, looking at her averted face, knowing that all 
he had to do was to reach out his hand and pluck her, fell 
to pondering whether, after all, there was any real worth in 
refined, grammatical English, and, so, forgot to reply to her. 

“ You put it all over him,” she said tentatively, with a 
laugh. 

“ He’s a husky young fellow, though,” he admitted 
generously. “If they hadn’t taken him away, he might 
have given me my hands full.” 

“Who was that lady friend I seen you with that night?” 
she asked abruptly. 

“Oh, just a lady friend,” was his answer. 

“Tt was a long time ago,” she murmured contemplatively. 
“ It seems like a thousand years.” 

But Martin went no further into the matter. He led 


860 MARTIN EDEN 


the conversation off into other channels. They had lunch 
in the restaurant, where he ordered wine and expensive 
delicacies and afterward he danced with her and with 
no one but her, till she was tired. He was a good dancer, 
and she whirled around and around with him in a heaven 
of delight, her head against his shoulder, wishing that it 
could last forever. Later in the afternoon they strayed 
off among the trees, where, in the good old fashion, she 
sat down while he sprawled on his back, his head in her 
lap. He lay and dozed, while she fondled his hair, looked 
down on his closed eyes, and loved him without reserve. 
Looking up suddenly, he read the tender advertisement in 
her face. Her eyes fluttered down, then they opened and 
looked into his with soft defiance. 

“T’ve kept straight all these years,” she said, her voice 
so low that it was almost a whisper. 

In his heart Martin knewthat it wasthe miraculous truth. 
And at his heart pleaded a great temptation. It was in 
his power to make her happy. Denied happiness himself, 
why should he deny happiness to her? He could marry 
her and take her down with him to dwell in the grass- 
walled castle in the Marquesas. ‘The desire to do it was 
strong, but stronger still was the imperative command of 
his nature not to do it. In spite of himself he was still 
faithful to Love. The old days of license and easy living 
were gone. He could not bring them back, nor could he 
go back to them. He was changed —how changed he had 
not realized until now. 

“JT am not a marrying man, Lizzie,” he said lightly. | 
The hand caressing his hair paused perceptibly, then 
went on with the same gentle stroke. He noticed her face 
harden, but it was with the hardness of resolution, for still 
the soft color was in her cheeks and she was all glowing 

and melting. 

“IT did not mean that —” she began, then faltered. “Or 
anyway I don’t care. 

“I don’t care,” she repeated. ‘I’m proud to be your 
friend. Id do anything for you. I’m made that way, I 
guess.” 


MARTIN EDEN . 361 


Martin sat up. He took her hand in«his. He did it 
deliberately, with warmth but without passion; and such 
warmth chilled her. . 

“ Don’t let’s talk about it,’ she said. 

“You are a great and noble woman,” he said. “And 
it is I who should be proud to know you. And I am, 
Iam. You are a ray of light to me in a very dark 
world, and I’ve got to be straight with you, just as straight 
as you have been.” 

“fT don’t care whether you’re straight with me or not. 
You could do anything with me. You could throw me 
in the dirt an’ walk on me. An’ you're the only man in 
the world that can,’ she added with a defiant flash. 
“JT ain’t taken care of myself ever since I was a kid for 
nothin’.” 

« And it’s just because of that that ’m not going to,” 
he said gently. ‘ You are so big and generous that you 
challenge me to equal generousness. I’m not marrying, 
and I’m not — well, loving without marrying, though ve 
done my share of that in the past. I’m sorry I came here 
to-day and met you. But it can’t be helped now, and I 
never expected it would turn out this way. 

“ But look here, Lizzie. I can’t begin to tell you how 
much I like you. JI do more than like you. I admire 
and respect you. You are magnificent, and you are 
magnificently good. But what’s the use of words? Yet 
there’s something I’d like to do. You've had a hard life; 
let me make it easy for you.” (A joyous hght welled 
into her eyes, then faded out again.) ‘I’m pretty sure of 
getting hold of some money soon—lots of it.” 

In that moment he abandoned the idea of the valley 
and the bay, the grass-walled castle and the trim, white 
schooner. After all, what did it matter? He could go 
away, as he had done so often, before the mast, on any 
ship bound anywhere. 

“Td like to turn it over to you. There must be some- 
thing you want—to go to school or business college. 
You might like to study and be a stenographer. I could 
fix it for you. Or maybe your father and mother are 


362 MARTIN EDEN 


living —I could set them up in a grocery store or some- 
thing. Anything you want, just name it, and I can fix 
it for you.” 

She made no reply, but sat, gazing straight before her, 
dry-eyed and motionless, but with an ache in the throat 
which Martin divined so strongly that it made his own 
throat ache. He regretted that he had spoken. It seemed 
so tawdry what he had offered her— mere money — 
compared with what she offered him. He offered her an 
extraneous thing with which he could part without a 
pang, while she offered him herself, along with disgrace 
and shame, and sin, and all her hopes of heaven. 

‘Don’t let’s talk about it,” she said with a catch in 
her voice that she changed to a cough. She stood up. 
‘¢Come on, let’s go home. I’m all tired out.” 

The day was done, and the merrymakers had nearly 
all departed. But as Martin and Lizzie emerged from 
the trees they found the gang waiting for them. Martin 
knew immediately the meaning of it. ‘Trouble was brew- 
ing. The gang was his body-guard.. They passed out 
through the gates of the park with, straggling in the rear, » 
a second gang, the friends that Lizzie’s young man had 
collected to avenge the loss of his lady. Several con- 
stables and special police officers, anticipating trouble, 
trailed along to prevent it, and herded the two gangs 
separately aboard the train for San Francisco. Martin 
told Jimmy that he would get off at Sixteenth Street 
Station and catch the electric car into Oakland. Lizzie 
was very quiet and without interest in what was impend- 
ing. ‘The train pulled in to Sixteenth Street Station, and 
the waiting electric car could be seen, the conductor of 
which was impatiently clanging the gong. 

“There she is,” Jimmy counselled. ‘Make a run for 
it, an’ we'll hold ’’em back. Now you go! Hit her up!” 

The hostile gang was temporarily disconcerted by the 
manceuyre, then it dashed from the train in pursuit. The 
staid and sober Oakland folk who sat upon the car scarcely 
noted the young fellow and the girl who ran for it and 
found a seat in front on the outside. They did not 


MARTIN EDEN : 363 


connect the couple with Jimmy, who sprang on the steps, 
crying to the motorman : — 

“Slam on the juice, old man, and beat it outa here!” 

The next moment Jimmy whirled about, and the pas- 
sengers saw him land his fist on the face of a running 
man who was trying to board the car. But fists were land- 
ing on faces the whole length of the car. Thus, Jimmy 
and his gang, strung out on the long, lower steps, met 
the attacking gang. ‘The car started with a great clang- 
ing of its gong, and, as Jimmy’s gang drove off the last 
assailants, they, too, jumped off to finish the job. The car 
dashed on, leaving the flurry of combat far behind, and 
its dumfounded passengers never dreamed that the quiet 
young man and the pretty working-girl sitting in the 
corner on the outside seat had been the cause of the 
row. 

Martin had enjoyed the fight, with a recrudescence of the 
old fighting thrills. But they quickly died away, and 
he was oppressed by a great sadness. He felt very old — 
centuries older than those careless, care-free young com- 
panions of his others days. He had travelled far, too far 
to go back. ’ ‘heir mode of life, which had once been 
his, was now discasteful to him. He was disappointed 
in it all. He'had developed into an alien. As the steam 
beer had tasted raw, so their companionship seemed raw 
to him. He was too far removed. Too many thousands 
of opened books yawned between them and him. He had 
exiled himself. He had travelled in the vast realm of in- 
tellect until he could no longer return home. On the 
other hand, he was human, and his gregarious need for 
companionship remained unsatisfied. He had found no 
new home. As the gang could not understand him, as 
his own family could not understand him, as the bour- 
geoisie could not understand him, so this girl beside him, 
whom he honored high, could not understand him nor 
the honor he paid her. His sadness was not untouched 
with bitterness as he thought it over. 

“ Make it up with him,” he advised Lizzie, at parting, as 
they stood in front of the workingman’s shack in which 


364 MARTIN EDEN 


she lived, near Sixth and Market. He referred to the 
young fellow whose place he had usurped that day. 

‘¢T can’t — now,” she said. 

“Oh, go on,” he said jovially. ‘All you have to do is 
whistle and he'll come running.” 

“J didn’t mean that,” she said simply. 

And he knew what she had meant. 

She leaned toward him as he was about to say good 
night. But she leaned not imperatively, not seductively, 
but wistfully and humbly. He was touched to the heart. 
His large tolerance rose up in him. He put his arms 
around her, and kissed her, and knew that upon his own lips 
rested as true a kiss as man ever received. 

“ My God!” she sobbed. “I could die for you. I could 
die for you.” 

She tore herself from him suddenly and ran up the steps. 
He felt a quick moisture in his eyes. 

‘“* Martin Eden,” he communed. ‘ You’re not a brute, 
and you’rea damn poor Nietzscheman. You’d marry her if 
you could and fill her quivering heart full with happiness. 
But you can’t, you can’t And it’s a damn shame. 

“6s A poor old tramp explains his poor ‘old ulcers,’” he 
muttered, remembering his Henly. ‘Life is, I think, a 
blunder and a shame.’ It is—a biander and a shame.” 


CHAPTER XLII 


“ THE Shame of the Sun” was published in October. As 
Martin cut the cords of the express package and the half- 
dozen complimentary copies from the publishers spilled 
out on the table, a heavy sadness fell upon him. He 
thought of the wild delight that would have been his 
had this happened a few short months before, and he con- 
trasted that delight that should have been with his present 
uncaring coldness. His book, his first book, and his pulse 
had not gone up a fraction of a beat, and he was only sad. 
It meant little to him now. The most it meant was that it 
might bring some money, and little enough did he care for 
money. 

He carried a copy out into the kitchen and presented it 
to Maria. 

“J did it,” he explained, in order to clear up her be- 
wilderment. ‘I wrote it in the room there, and I guess 
some few quarts of your vegetable soup went into the 
making of it. Keepit. It’s yours. Just to remember 
me by, you know.” 

He was not bragging, not showing off. His sole motive 
was to make her happy, to make her proud of him, to jus- 
tify her long faith in him. She put the book in the front 
room on top of the family Bible. A sacred thing was this 
book her lodger had made, a fetich of friendship. It 
softened the blow of his having been a laundryman, and 
though she could not understand a line of it, she knew 
that every line of it was great. She was a simple, practi- 
cal, hard-working woman, but she possessed faith in large 
endowment. 

Just as emotionlessly as he had received “* The Shame of 
the Sun ” did he read the reviews of it that came in weekly 

365 


066 MARTIN EDEN 


from the clipping bureau. The book was making a hit, 
that was evident. It meant more gold in the money sack. 
He could fix up Lizzie, redeem all his promises, and still 
have enough left to build his grass-walled castle. 

Singletree, Darnley & Co. had cautiously brought out 
an edition of fifteen hundred copies, but the first reviews 
had started a second edition of twice the size through the 
presses; and ere this was delivered a third edition of 
five thousand had been ordered. A London firm made 
arrangements by cable for an English edition, and hot- 
footed upon this came the news of French, German, and 
Scandinavian translations in progress. The attack upon the 
Maeterlinck school could not have been made at a more 
opportune moment. A fierce controversy was precipitated. 
Saleeby and Haeckel indorsed and defended “The Shame 
of the Sun,” for once finding themselves on the same side 
of aquestion. Crookes and Wallace ranged up on the op- 
posing side, while Sir Oliver Lodge attempted to formulate 
a compromise that would jibe with his particular cosmic 
theories. Maeterlinck’s followers rallied around the stand- 
ard of mysticism. Chesterton set the whole world 
laughing with a series of alleged non-partisan essays on the 
subject, and the whole affair, controversy and controver- 
sialists, was well-nigh swept into the pit by a thundering 
broadside from George Bernard Shaw. Needless to say 
the arena was crowded with hosts of lesser lights, and the 
dust and sweat and din became terrific. 

“Tt is a most marvellous happening,” Singletree, Darn- 
ley & Co. wrote Martin, “a critical philosophic essay - 
selling like a novel. You could not have chosen your 
subject better, and all contributory factors have been un- 
warrantedly propitious. We need scarcely to assure you 
that we are making hay while the sun shines. Over 
forty thousand copies have already been sold in the United 
States and Canada, and a new edition of twenty thousand 
is on the presses. We are overworked, trying to supply 
the demand. Nevertheless we have helped to create that 
demand. We have already spent five thousand dollars in 
advertising. The book is bound to be a record-breaker. 


MARTIN EDEN ; 367 


“Please find herewith a contract in duplicate for your 
next book which we have taken the liberty of forwarding 
to you. You will please note that we have increased 
your royalties to twenty per cent, which is about as high 
as a conservative publishing house dares go. If our offer 
is agreeable to you, please fill in the proper blank space 
with the title of your book. We make no stipulations 
concerning its nature. Any book on any subject. If 
you have one already written, so much the better. Now 
is the time to strike. The iron could not be hotter. 

“On receipt of signed contract we shall be pleased to 
make you an advance on royalties of five thousand dollars. 
You see, we have faith in you, and we are going in on 
this thing big. We should like, also, to discuss with you 
the drawing up of a contract for a term of years, say ten, 
during which we shall have the exclusive right of pub- 
lishing in book-form all that you produce. But more 
of this anon.” 

Martin laid down the letter and worked a problem in 
mental arithmetic, finding the product of fifteen cents 
times sixty thousand to be nine thousand dollars. He 
signed the new contract, inserting ‘“The Smoke of Joy” 
in the blank space, and mailed it back to the publishers 
along with the twenty storiettes he had written in the 
days before he discovered the formula for the newspaper 
storiette. And promptly as the United States mail could 
deliver and return, came Singletree, Darnley & Co.’s 
check for five thousand dollars. 

“YT want you to come down town with me, Maria, this 
afternoon about two o’clock,” Martin said, the morning 
the check arrived. ‘“ Or, better, meet me at Fourteenth 
and Broadway at two o’clock. Tl be looking out for 

ou.” 

At the appointed time she was there ; but shoes was the 
only clew to the mystery her mind had been capable of 
evolving, and she suffered a distinct shock of disappoint- 
ment when Martin walked her right by a shoe-store and 
dived into a real estate office. . What happened thereupon 
resided forever after in her memory as a dream. Fine 


368 | MARTIN EDEN 


gentlemen smiled at her benevolently as they talked with 
Martin and one another; a type-writer clicked ; signatures 
were affixed to an imposing document; her own landlord 
was there, too, and affixed his signature ; and when all was 
over and she was outside on the sidewalk, her landlord 
spoke to her, saying, “ Well, Maria, you won’t have to 
pay me no seven dollars and a half this month.” 

Maria was too stunned for speech. 

‘ Or next month, or the next, or the next,” her landlord 
said. 

She thanked him incoherently, as if for a favor. And 
it was not until she had returned home to North Oakland 
and conferred with her own kind, and had the Portuguese 
grocer investigate, that she really knew that she was the 
owner of the little house in which she had lived and for 
which she had paid rent so long. 

* Why don’t you trade with me no more?” the Portu- 
guese grocer asked Martin that evening, stepping out to 
hail him when he got off the car; and Martin explained 
that he wasn’t doing his own cooking any more, and then 
went in and had a drink of wine on the house. He noted 
it was the best wine the grocer had in stock. 

“ Maria,” Martin announced that night, “I’m going to 
leave you. And your’re going to leave here yourself soon. 
Then you can rent the house and be a landlord yourself. 
You’ve a brother in San Leandro or Haywards, and he’s 
in the milk business. I want you to send all your wash- 
ing back unwashed — understand ?— unwashed, and to 
go out to San Leandro to-morrow, or Haywards, or 
wherever it is, and see that brother of yours. Tell 
him to come to see me. I'll be stopping at the Metropole 
down in Oakland. He'll know a good milk-ranch when 
he sees one.” 

And so it was that Maria became a landlord and the 
sole owner of a dairy, with two hired men to do the work 
for her and a bank account that steadily increased despite 
the fact that her whole brood wore shoes and went to 
school. Few persons ever meet the fairy princes they 
dream about; but Maria, who worked hard and whose 


MARTIN EDEN ‘ 369 


head was hard, never dreaming about fairy princes, enter- 
tained hers in the guise of an ex-laundryman. 

In the meantime the world had begun to ask : ** Who 
is this Martin Eden?” He had declined to give any bio- 
graphical data to his publishers, but the newspapers were 
not to be denied. Oakland was his own town, and the 
reporters nosed out scores of individuals who could supply 
information. All that he was and was not, all that he 
had done and most of what he had not done, was spread 
out for the delectation of the public, accompanied by 
snapshots and photographs—the latter procured from 
the local photographer who had once taken Martin’s 
picture and who promptly copyrighted it and put it on the 
market. At first, so great was his disgust with the 
magazines and all bourgeois society, Martin fought 
against publicity; but in the end, because it was easier ; 
than not to, he surrendered. He found that he could not 
refuse himself to the special writers who travelled long 
distances to see him. ‘Then again, each day was so many 
hours long, and, since he no longer was occupied with 
writing and studying, those hours had to be occupied 
somehow; so he yielded to what was to him a whim, per- 
mitted interviews, gave his opinions on literature and 
philosophy, and even accepted invitations of the bour- 


geoisie. He had settled down into a strange and com. .... 


fortable state of mind. Heno longer cared. He forgave 
everybody, even the cub reporter who had painted him 
red and to whom he now granted a full page with 
specially posed, photographs. 

He saw Lizzie occasionally, and it was patent that she 
regretted the greatness that had come tohim. It widened 
the space between them. Perhaps it was with the hope 
of narrowing it that she yielded to his persuasions to go 
to night school and business college and to have herself 
gowned by a wonderful dressmaker who charged out- 
rageous prices. She improved visibly from day to day, 
until Martin wondered if he was doing right, for he knew 
that all her compliance and endeavor was for his sake. 
She was trying to make herself of worth in his eyes — of 

2B 





3/0 MARTIN EDEN 


the sort of worth he seemed to value. Yet he gave her 
no hope, treating her in brotherly fashion and rarely see- 
ing her. 

“ Overdue” was rushed upon the market by the Mere- 
dith-Lowell Company in the height of his popularity, and 
being fiction, in point of sales it made even a bigger strike 
than “ The Shame of the Sun.” Week after week his 
was the credit of the unprecedented performance of havy- 
ing two books at the head of the list of best-sellers. Not 
only did the story take with the fiction-readers, but those 
who read “ The Shame of the Sun” with avidity were 
likewise attracted to the sea-story by the cosmic grasp of 
mastery with which he had handled it. First, he had at- 
tacked the literature of mysticism, and had done it exceed- 
ing well; and, next, he had successfully supplied the very 
literature he had exposited, thus proving himself to be 
that rare genius, a critic and a creator in one. 

Money poured in on him, fame poured in on him; he 
flashed, comet-like, through the world of literature, and he 
was more amused than interested by the stir he was mak- 
ing. One thing was puzzling him, a little thing that 
would have puzzled the world had it known. But the 
world would have puzzled over his bepuzzlement rather 
than over the little thing that to him loomed gigantic. 
Judge Blount invited him to dinner. That was the little 
thing, or the beginning of the little thing, that was soon 
to become the big thing. He had insulted Judge Blount, 
treated him abominably, and Judge Blount, meeting him 
on the street, invited him to dinner. Martin bethought 
himself of the numerous occasions on which he had met 
Judge Blount at the Morses’ and when Judge Blount had 
not invited him to dinner. Why had he not invited him 
to dinner then ? he asked himself. He had not changed. 
He was the same Martin Eden. What made the dif- 
ference? The fact that the stuff he had written had 
appeared inside the covers of books? But it was work 
performed. It was not something he had done since. It 
was achievement accomplished at the very time Judge 
Blount was sharing this general view and sneering 


MARTIN EDEN 371 


at his Spencer and his intellect. Therefore it was not 
for any real value, but for a purely fictitious value that 
Judge Blount invited him to dinner. 

Martin grinned and accepted the invitation, marvelling 
the while at his complacence. And at the dinner, where, 
with their womenkind, were half a dozen of those that 
sat in high places, and where Martin found himself quite 
the lion, Judge Blount, warmly seconded by Judge 
Hanwell, urged privately that Martin should permit his 
name to be put up for the Styx —the ultra-select club to 
which belonged, not the mere men of wealth, but the men 
of attainment. And Martin declined, and was more 
puzzled than ever. 

He was kept busy disposing of his heap of manuscripts. 
He was overwhelmed by requests from editors. It had 
been discovered that he was a stylist, with meat under his 
style. The Northern Review, after publishing “ The Cradle 
of Beauty,” had written him for half a dozen similar 
essays, which would have been supplied out of the heap, 
had not Burton’s Magazine, in a speculative mood, offered 
him five hundred dollars each for five essays. He wrote 
back that he would supply the demand, but at a thousand 
dollars an essay. He remembered that all these manu- 
scripts had been refused by the very magazines that were 
now clamoring for them. And their refusals had been 
cold-blooded, automatic, stereotyped. They had made 
him sweat, and now he intended to make them sweat. 
Burton's Magazine paid his price for five essays, and the 
remaining four, at the same rate, were snapped up by 
Mackintosh’s Monthly, The Northern Review being too poor 
to stand the page. Thus went out to the world “The 
High Priests of Mystery,” ‘The Wonder-Dreamers,” 
“The Yardstick of the Ego,” “Philosophy of Dlusion,” 
“God and Clod,” “ Art and Biology,” “ Critics and Test- 
tubes,” ‘Star-dust,” and “The Dignity of Usury,” — 
to raise storms and rumblings and mutterings that were 
many a day in dying down. 

Editors wrote to him telling him to name his own terms, 
which he did, but it was always for work performed. He 


O12 MARTIN EDEN 


refused resolutely to pledge himself to any new thing. 
The thought of again setting pen to paper maddened him. 
He had seen Brissenden torn to pieces by the crowd, and 
despite the fact that him the crowd acclaimed, he could 
not get over the shock nor gather any respect for the 
crowd. His very popularity seemed a disgrace and a 
treason to Brissenden. It made him wince, but he made 
up his mind to go on and fill the money-bag. 

He received letters from editors like the following : 
“ About a year ago we were unfortunate enough to re- 
fuse your collection of love-poems. We were greatly im- 
pressed by them at the time, but certain arrangements 
already entered into prevented our taking them. If you 
still have them, and if you will be kind enough to forward 
them, we shall be glad to publish the entire collection on 
your own terms. We are also prepared to make a most 
advantageous offer for bringing them out in book-form.” 

Martin recollected his blank-verse tragedy, and sent it 
instead. He read it over before mailing, and was par- 
ticularly impressed by its sophomoric amateurishness 
and general worthlessness. But he sent it; and it was 
published, to the everlasting regret of the editor. ‘The 
public was indignant and incredulous. It was too far a 
cry from Martin Eden’s high standard to that serious 
bosh. It was asserted that he had never written it, that 
the magazine had faked it very clumsily, or that Martin 
Eden was emulating the elder Dumas and at the height 
of success was hiring his writing done for him. But 
when he explained that the tragedy was an early effort of 
his literary childhood, and that the magazine had refused 
to be happy unless it got it, a great laugh went up at the 
magazine’s expense and a change in the editorship fol- 
lowed. ‘The tragedy was never brought out in book-form, 
though Martin pocketed the advance royalties that had 
been paid. 

Coleman’s Weekly sent Martin a lengthy telegram, cost- 
ing nearly three hundred dollars, offering him a thousand 
dollars an article for twenty articles. He was to travel 
over the United States, with all expenses paid, and select 


MARTIN EDEN ; tes 


whatever topics interested him. The body of the tele- 
gram was devoted to hypothetical topics in order to show 
him the freedom of range that was to be his. The only 
restriction placed upon him was that he must confine 
himself to the United States. Martin sent his inability to 
accept and his regrets by wire ‘* collect.” 

“ Wiki-Wiki,” published in Warren’s Monthly, was an 
instantaneous success. It was brought out forward in a 
wide-margined, beautifully decorated volume that struck 
the holiday trade and sold like wildfire. ‘The critics were 
unanimous in the belief that it would take its place with 
those two classics by two great writers, “The Bottle 
Imp” and “The Magic Skin.” 

The public, however, received the “ Smoke of Joy ” col- 
lection rather dubiously and coldly. The audacity and 
unconventionality of the storiettes was a shock to bourgeois 
morality and prejudice ; but when Paris went mad over 
the immedate translation that was made, the American 
and English reading public followed suit and bought so 
many copies that Martin compelled the conservative house 
of Singletree, Darnley '& Co. to pay a flat royalty of 
twenty-five per cent for a third book, and thirty per 
cent flat for a fourth. These two volumes comprised all 
the short stories he had written and which had received, 
or were receiving, serial publication. “The Ring of 
Bells” and his horror stories constituted one collection; the 
other collection was composed of “Adventure,” ‘I'he Pot,” 
“The Wine of Life,” “The Whirlpool,” “The Jostling 
Street,’ and four other stories. The Lowell-Meredith 
Company captured the collection of all his essays, and the 
Maxmillian Company got his “Sea Lyrics” and the “Love- 
eycle,” the latter receiving serial publication in the Ladies’ 
Home Companion after the payment of an extortionate price. 

Martin heaved a sigh of relief when he had disposed of 
the last manuscript. ‘The grass-walled castle and the white, 
coppered schooner were very near to him. Well, at any 
rate he had discovered Brissenden’s contention that noth- 
ing of merit found its way into the magazines. His own 
success demonstrated that Brissenden had been wrong. 


O14 MARTIN EDEN 


And yet, somehow, he had a feeling that Brissenden had 
been right, after all. ‘The Shame of the Sun” had been 
the cause of his success more than the stuff he had writ- 
ten. That stuff had been merely incidental. It had been 
rejected right and left by the magazines. The publica- 


ption of “The Shame of the Sun” had started a controversy 


and precipitated the landslide in his favor. Had there 
been no “Shame of the Sun” there would have been no 
landslide, and had there been no miracle in the go of “The 
Shame of the Sun” there would have been no landslide. 


_ Singletree, Darnley & Co. attested that miracle. They 
_ had brought out a first edition of fifteen hundred copies 


and been dubious of selling it. They were experienced 
publishers and no one had been more astounded than they 


_ at the success which had followed. To them it had been 


in truth a miracle. They never got over it, and every 
letter they wrote him reflected their reverent awe of that 
first mysterious happening. ‘They did not attempt to ex- 
plain it. There was no explaining it. It had happened. 
In the face of all experience to the contrary, it had hap- 


“~pened. 


So it was, reasoning thus, that Martin questioned the 
validity of his popularity. It was the bourgeoisie that 
bought his books and poured its gold into his money-sack, 
and from what little he knew of the bourgeoisie it was not 
clear to him how it could possibly appreciate or compre- 
hend what he had written. His intrinsic beauty and power 
meant nothing to the hundreds of thousands who were ac- 
claiming him and buying his books. He was the fad of 
the hour, the adventurer who had stormed Parnassus while 
the gods nodded. The hundreds of thousands read him 
and acclaimed him with the same brute non-understanding 
with which they had flung themselves on Brissenden’s 
“ Hphemera” and torn it to pieces—a wolf-rabble that 
fawned on him instead of fanging him. Fawn or fang, it 
was all a matter of chance. One thing he knew with ab- 
solute certitude: “ Ephemera” was infinitely greater than 
anything he haddone. It was infinitely greater than any- 
thing he had in him. It was a poem of centuries. Then 


MARTIN EDEN BY i) 
the tribute the mob paid him was a sorry tribute indeed, 
for that same mob had wallowed ‘“ Ephemera” into the 
mire. He sighed heavily and with satisfaction. He was 
glad the last manuscript was sold and that he would soon 
be done with it all. 


CHAPTER XLIV 


Mr. Morse met Martin in the office of the Hotel Metro- 
pole. Whether he had happened there just casually, in- 
tent on other affairs, or whether he had come there for the 
direct purpose of inviting him to dinner, Martin never 
could quite make up his mind, though he inclined toward 
the second hypothesis. At any rate, invited to dinner he 
was by Mr. Morse — Ruth’s father, who had forbidden him 
the house and broken off the engagement. 

Martin was not angry. He was not even on his dignity. 
He tolerated Mr. Morse, wondering the while how it felt 
toeat such humble pie. He did not decline the invitation. 
Instead, he put it off with vagueness and indefiniteness 
and inquired after the family, particularly after Mrs. Morse 
and Ruth. Hespoke her name without hesitancy, naturally, 
though secretly surprised that he had had no inward quiver, 
no old, familiar increase of pulse and warm surge of blood. 

He had many invitations to dinner, some of which he 
accepted. Persons got themselves introduced to him in 
order to invite him to dinner. And he went on puzzling 
over the little thing that was becoming a great thing. 
Bernard Higginbotham invited him to dinner. He puz- 
zled the harder. Heremembered the days of his desperate 
starvation when no one invited him to dinner. ‘That was — 
the time he needed dinners, and went weak and faint for 
lack of them and lost weight from sheer famine. That 
was the paradox of it. When he wanted dinners, no one 
gave them to him, and now that he could buy a hundred 
thousand dinners and was losing his appetite, dinners were 
thrust upon him right and left. But why? There was 
no justice init, no merit on his part. He was no different. 
All the work he had done was even at that time work per- 
formed. Mr. and Mrs. Morse had condemned him for an 
idler and a shirk and through Ruth had urged that he take 

376 


MARTIN EDEN 377 


a clerk’s position in an office. Furthermore, they had 
been aware of his work performed. Manuscript after 
manuscript of his had been turned over to them by Ruth. 
They had read them. It was the very same work that 
had put his name in all the papers, and it was his name 
being in all the papers that led them to invite him. 

One thing was certain: the Morses had not cared to 
have him for himself or for his work. Therefore they 
could not want him now for himself or for his work, but 
for the fame that was his, because he was somebody 
amongst men, and — why not ? — because he had a hun- 
dred thousand dollars or so. That was the way bourgeois 
society valued a man, and who was he to expect it other- 
wise? But he was proud. He disdained such valuation. 
He desired to be valued for himself, or for his work. which, 
after all, was an expression of himself. ‘That was the 
way Lizzie valued him. The work, with her, did not 
even count. She valued him, himself. That was the 
way Jimmy, the plumber, and all the old gang valued 
him. That had been proved often enough in the days 
when he ran with them ; it had been proved that Sunday 
at Shell Mound Park. - His work could go hang. What 
they liked, and were willing to scrap for, was just Mart 
Eden, one of the bunch and a pretty good guy. 

Then there was Ruth. She had liked him for himself, 
that was indisputable. And yet, muchas she had liked him 
she had liked the bourgeois standard of valuation more. 
She had opposed his writing, and principally, it seemed to 
him, because it did not earn money. That had been her crit- 
icism of his “Love-cycle.” She,too,had urged him to geta 
job. It was true, she refined it to “ position,” but it meant 
the same thing, and in his own mind the old nomenclature 
stuck. He had read her all that he wrote — poems, 
stories, essays — “ Wiki- Wiki,” “ The Shame of the Sun,” 
everything. And she had always and consistently urged 
him to get a job, to go to work —good God! as if he 
hadn’t been working, robbing sleep, exhausting life, in 
‘orde: to be worthy of her. | 

) the little thing grew bigger. He was healthy and 





o18 MARTIN EDEN 


normal, ate regularly, slept long hours, and yet the grow- 
ing little thing was becoming an obsession. Work per- 
formed. ‘The phrase haunted his brain. He sat opposite 
Bernard Higginbotham at a heavy Sunday dinner over 
Higginbotham’s Cash Store, and it was all he could do to 
restrain himself from shouting out: — 

“It was work performed! And now you feed me, when 
_/then you let me starve, forbade me your house, and 
“ damned me because I wouldn’t get a job. And the work 
was already done, all done. And now, when I speak, 
you check the thought unuttered on your lips and hang 
on my lips and pay respectful attention to whatever I choose 
to say. I tell you your party is rotten and filled with graft- 
ers, and instead of flying into a rage you hum and haw 
and admit there is a great deal in what I say. And why? 
. Because I’m famous ; because I’ve a lot of money. Not 
because I’m Martin Eden, a pretty good fellow and not 
particularly a fool. I could tell you the moon is made of 
green cheese and you would subscribe to the notion, at 
least you would not repudiate it, because I’ve got dollars, 
mountains of them. And ié was all done long ago; it 
was work performed, I tell you, when you spat upon me 
as the dirt under your feet.” ? 

But Martin did not shout out. The thought gnawed 
in his brain, an unceasing torment, while he smiled and 
succeeded in being tolerant. As he grew silent, Bernard 
Higginbotham got the reins and did the talking. He was 
a success himself, and proud of it. He-was self-made. 
No one had helped him. He owed no man. He was 
fulfilling his duty as a citizen and bringing up a large 
family. And there was Higginbotham’s Cash Store, that 
monument of his own industry and ability. He loved 
Higginbotham’s Cash Store as some men loved their 
wives. He opened up his heart to Martin, showed with 
what keenness and with what enormous planning he had 
made the store. And he had plans for it, ambitious 
plans. The neighborhood was growing up fast. The 
store was really too small. If he had more room, he wov'!d 
be able to put in a score of labor-saving and money-sig@fg 





MARTIN EDEN 379 


improvements. And he would doit yet. He was straining 
every effort for the day when he could buy the adjoining lot 
and put up another two-story framebuilding. The upstairs 
he could rent, and the whole ground-floor of both buildings 
would be Higginbotham’s Cash Store. His eyes glistened 
when he spoke of the new sign that would stretch clear 
across both buildings. 

Martin forgot to listen. The refrain of “ Work per- 
formed,” in his own brain, was drowning the other’s 
clatter. The refrain maddened him, and he tried to escape 
from it. 

“ How much did you say it would cost?” he asked 
suddenly. 

His brother-in-law paused in the middle of an expatia- 
tion on the business opportunities of the neighborhood. 
He hadn’t said how much it would cost. But he knew. 
He had figured it out a score of times. 

“At the way lumber is now,” he said, “four thousand 
could do it.” 

“ Including the sign ?”’ 

“ T didn’t count on that. Itd just have to come, onc’t 
the buildin’ was there.” 

« And the ground ?” 

“Three thousand more.”’ 

He leaned forward, licking ‘his lips, nervously spread- 
ing and closing his fingers, while he watched Martin 
write a check. When it was passed over to him, he 
glanced at the amount — seven thousand dollars. 

“7 I can’t afford to pay more than six per cent,” he 
said huskily. 

Martin wanted ‘to laugh, but, instead, demanded : — 

“How much would that be?” 

“‘ Lemme see. Six per cent — six times seven — four 
hundred an’ twenty.” 

“That would be thirty-five dollars a month, wouldn’t 
it 7 9 ? 

Higginbotham nodded. 

fe a is if you’ve no objection, we'll arrange it this 
way.” Martin glanced at Gertrude. “You can have the 


380 MARTIN EDEN 


principal to keep for yourself, if you'll use the thirty-five 
dollars a month for cooking and washing and scrubbing. 
The seven thousand is yours if you'll guarantee that Ger- 
trude does no more drudgery. Is ita go?” 

Mr. Higginbotham swallowed hard. That his wife 
should do no more housework was an affront to his thrifty 
soul. The magnificent present was the coating of a pill, 
a bitter pill. That his wife should not work! It gagged 
him. 

« All right, then,” Martin said. “ll pay the thirty- 
five a month, and —”’ 

He reached across the table for the check. But Bernard 
Higginbotham got his hand on it first, crying: — 

“T accept! Iaccept!” 

When Martin got on the electric car, he was very sick 
and tired. He looked up at the assertive sign. 

“The swine,” he groaned. ‘The swine, the swine. ” 

When WMackintosh’s Magazine published “ The Palm- 
ist,” featuring it with decorations by Berthier and with 
two pictures by Wenn, Hermann von Schmidt forgot that 
he had called the verses obscene. He announced that his 
wife had inspired the poem, saw to it that the news reached 
the ears of a reporter, and submitted to an interview by a 
staff writer who was accompanied by a staff photographer 
and a staff artist. The result was a full page in a Sunday 
supplement, filled with photographs and idealized draw- 
ings of Marian, with many intimate details of Martin 
Eden and his family, and with the full text of “The 
Palmist”’ in large type, and republished by special per- 
mission of Mackintosh’s Magazine. It caused quite a 
stir in the neighborhood, and good housewives were proud 
to have the acquaintance of the great writer’s sister, while 
those who had not made haste to cultivate it. Hermann 
von Schmidt chuckled in his little repair shop and decided 
to order a new lathe. “Better than advertising,” he told 
Marian, “and it costs nothing.” 

“ We'd better have him to dinner,” she suggested. 

And to dinner Martin came, making himself agreeable 
with the fat wholesale butcher and his fatter wife —im- 


MARTIN EDEN 381 


a 


portant folk, they, likely to be of use to a rising young 
man like Hermann von Schmidt. No less a bait, however, 
had been required to draw them to his house than his great 
brother-in-law. Another man at table who had swallowed 
the same bait was the superintendent of the Pacific Coast 
agencies for the Asa Bicycle Company. Him Von Schmidt 
desired to please and propitiate because from him could 
be obtained the Oakland agency for the bicycle. So Her- 
mann yon Schmidt found it a goodly asset to have Martin 
for a brother-in-law, but in his heart of hearts he couldn’t 
understand where it all came in. In the silent watches of 
the night, while his wife slept, he had floundered through 
Martin’s books and poems, and decided that the world was 
a fool to buy them. 

And in his heart of hearts Martin understood the situa- 
tion only too well, as he leaned back and gloated at Von 
Schmidt’s head, in fancy punching it well-nigh off of 
him, sending blow after blow home just right—the 
chuckle-headed Dutchman! One thing he did like about 
him, however. Poor as he was, and determined to rise 
as he was, he nevertheless hired one servant to take the 
heavy work off of Marian’s hands. Martin talked with 
the superintendent of the Asa agencies, and after dinner 
he drew him aside with Hermann, whom he backed finan- 
cially for the best bicycle store with fittings in Oakland. 
He went further, and in a private talk with Hermann 
told him to keep his eyes open for an automobile agency 
and garage, for there was no reason that he should not be 
able to run both establishments successfully. 

With tears in her eyes and her arms around his neck, 
Marian, at parting, told Martin how much she loved him 
and always had loved him. It was true, there was a per- 
ceptible halt midway in her assertion, which she glossed 
over with more tears and kisses and incoherent stammer- 
ings, and which Martin inferred to be her appeal for for- 
giveness for the time she had lacked faith in him and 
insisted on his getting a job. 

“He can’t never keep his money, that’s sure,” Her- 
mann von Schmidt confided to his wife. “He got mad 


382 MARTIN EDEN 


when I spoke of interest, an’ he said damn the principal 
and if I mentioned it again, he’d punch my Dutch head off. 
That’s what he said —my Dutch head. But he’s all right, 
even if he ain’t no business man. He’s given me my 
chance, an’ he’s all right.” 

Invitations to dinner poured in on Martin; and the 
more they poured, the more he puzzled. He sat, the guest 
of honor, at an Arden Club banquet, with men of note 
whom he had heard about and read about all his hfe; and 
they told him how, when they had read “ The Ring of 
Bells” in the Transcontinental, and “The Peri and the 
Pearl” in The Hornet, they had immediately picked him 
fora winner. My God! and I was hungry and in rags, 
he thought to himself. Why didn’t you give me a dinner 
then? Then was the time. It was work performed. If 
you are feeding me now for work performed, why did you 
not feed me then when I needed it? Not one word in “The 
Ring of Bells,” norin “The Peri and the Pearl” has been 
changed. No; you're not feeding me now for work per- 
formed. You are feeding me because everybody else is 
feeding me and because it is an honor to feed me. You 
are feeding me now because you are herd animals; because 
you are part of the mob; because the one blind, automatic 
thought in the mob-mind just now is to feed me. And 
where does Martin Eden and the work Martin Eden per- 
formed come in in all this? he asked himself plaintively, 
then arose to respond cleverly and wittily to a clever and 
witty toast. 

Soit went. Wherever he happened to be —at the Press 
Club, at the Redwood Club, at pink teas and literary gather- 
ings — always were remembered “The Ring of Bells” and 
‘The Peri and the Pearl”? when they were first published. 
And always was Martin’s maddening and unuttered de- 
mand: Why didn’t you feed me then? It was work per- 
formed. “The Ring of Bells” and “The Peri and the 
Pearl” are not changed one iota. They were just as 
artistic, just as worth while, then as now. But you are 
not feeding me for their sake, nor for the sake of anything 
else I have written. You're feeding me because it is the 


MARTIN EDEN _ 383 


style of feeding just now, because the whole mob is crazy 
with the idea of feeding Martin Eden. 

And often, at such times, he would abruptly see slouch 
in among the company a young hoodlum in square-cut coat 
and under a stiff-rim Stetson hat. It happened to him at 
the Gallina Society in Oakland one afternoon. As he rose 
from his chair and stepped forward across the platform, he 
saw stalk through the wide door at the rear of the great 
room the young hoodlum with the square-cut coat and 
stiff-rim hat. Five hundred fashionably gowned women 
turned their heads, so intent and steadfast was Martin’s 
gaze, to see what he was seeing. But they saw only the 
empty centre aisle. He saw the young tough lurching 
down that aisle and wondered if he would remove the stiff- 
rim which never yet had he seen him without. Straight 
down the aisle he came, and up the platform. Martin 
could have wept over that youthful shade of himself, when 
he thought of all that lay before him. Across the platform 
he swaggered, right up to Martin, and into the foreground 
of Martin’s consciousness disappeared. The five hundred 
women applauded softly with gloved hands, seeking to en- 
courage the bashful great man who wastheir guest. And 
Martin shook the vision from his brain, smiled, and began 
to speak. 

TheSuperintendent of Schools, good old man, stopped Mar- 
tin on the street and remembered him, recalling seances in 
his office when Martin was expelled from school for fighting. 

‘‘T read your ‘ Ring of Bells’ in one of the magazines 
quite a time ago,” he said. “It was as good as Poe. 
Splendid, I said at the time, splendid!” 

Yes, and twice in the months that followed you passed 
me on the street and did not know me, Martin almost said 
aloud. Each time I was hungry and heading for the 
pawnbroker. Yet it was work performed. You did not 
know me then. Why do you know me now ? 

““T was remarking to my wife only the other day,” the 
other was saying, “ wouldn’t it be a good idea to have you 
out to dinner some time? And she quite agreed with me. 
Yes, she quite agreed with me.” 


384. MARTIN EDEN 


“Dinner?” Martin said so sharply that it was almost a 
snarl. 

“Why, yes, yes, dinner, you know — just pot luck with 
us, with your old superintendent, you rascal,” he uttered 
nervously, poking Martin in an attempt at jocular fellow- 
ship. 

Martin went down the street in a daze. He stopped at 
the corner and looked about him vacantly. 

“ Well, I'll be damned !” he murmured at last. ‘ The 
old fellow was afraid of me.” 


CHAPTER XLV 


KREIS came to Martin one day — Kreis, of the “real 
dirt”; and Martin turned to him with relief, to receive the 
glowing details of a scheme sufficiently wild-catty to in- 
terest him as a fictionist rather than an investor. Kreis 
paused long enough in the midst of his exposition to tell 
him that in most of his “ Shame of the Sun” he had been 
a chump. 

* But I didn’t come here to spout philosophy,” Kreis 
wenton. ‘“ What I want to know is whether or not you 
will put a thousand dollars in on this deal?” 

“No, Pm not chump enough for that, at any rate,” 
Martin answered. “ But Ill tell you what I will do. You 
gave me the greatest night of my life. You gave me what 
money cannot buy. Now Tve got money, and it means 
nothing to me. Id like to turn over to you a thousand 
dollars of what I don’t value for what you gave me that 
night and which was beyond price. You need the money. 
Tve got more than I need. You want it. You came for 
it. There’s no use scheming it out of me. Take it.” 

Kreis betrayed no surprise. He folded the check 
away in his pocket. 

“At that rate I’d like the contract of providing you 
with many such nights,” he said. 

“Too late.” Martin shook his head. “ That night was 
the one night forme. I was in paradise. It’s common- 
place with you, I know. But it wasn’t to me. [ shall 
never live at such a pitch again. I’m done with philos- 
ophy. I want never to hear another word of it.” 

* The first dollar I ever made in my life out of my phi- 
losophy,” Kreis remarked, as he paused in the doorway. 
« And then the market broke.” 

Mrs. Morse drove by Martin on the street one day, and 

2c 385 


al 


386 MARTIN EDEN 


smiled and nodded. He smiled back and lifted his hat. 
The episode did not affect him. A month before it might 
have disgusted him, or made him curious and set him to 
speculating about her state of consciousness at that mo- 
ment. But now it was not provocative of a second thought. 
He forgot about it the next moment. He forgot about it 
as he would have forgotten the Central Bank Building or 
the City Hall after having walked past them. Yet his 
mind was preternaturally active. His thoughts went ever 
around and around inacircle. The centre of that circle 
was “work performed”; it ate at his brain like a deathless 
maggot. He awoke to it in the morning. It tormented 
his dreams at night. Every affair of life around him that 
penetrated through his senses immediately related itself to 
“‘work performed.” He drove along the path of relent- 
less logic to the conclusion that he was nobody, nothing. 
Mart Eden, the hoodlum, and Mart Eden, the sailor, had 
been real, had been he; but Martin Eden! the famous 
writer, did not exist. Martin Eden, the famous writer, was 
a vapor that had arisen in the mob-mind and by the mob- 
mind had been thrust into the corporeal being of Mart 
Eden, the hoodlum and sailor. But it couldn’t fool him. 
He was not that sun-myth that the mob was worshipping 
and sacrificing dinners to. He knew better. 

He read the magazines about himself, and pored over 
portraits of himself published therein until he was unable 
to associate his identity with those portraits. He was the 
fellow who had lived and thrilled and loved; who had ~ 
been easy-going and tolerant of the frailties of life; who 
had served in the forecastle, wandered in strange lands, and 
led his gang in the old fighting days. He was the fellow 
who had been stunned at first by the thousands of books 
in the free library, and who had afterward learned his 
way among them and mastered them; he was the fellow 
who had burned the midnight oil and bedded with a spur 
and written books himself. But the one thing he was not 
was that colossal appetite that all the mob was bent upon 
feeding. 

There were things, however, in the magazines that 


MARTIN EDEN 387 
amused him. All the magazines were claiming him. 
Warren's Monthly advertised to its subscribers that it was 
always on the quest after new writers, and that, among 
others, it had introduced Martin Eden to the reading pub- 
lic. The White Mouse claimed him; so did The Northern 
Review and Mackintosh’s Magazine, until silenced by The 
Globe, which pointed triumphantly to its files where the 
mangled “Sea Lyrics” lay buried. Youth and Age, which 
had come to life again after having escaped paying its 
bills, put in a prior claim, which nobody but farmers’ 
children ever read. The Transcontinental made a dignified 
and convincing statement of how it first discovered Mar- 
tin Eden, which was warmly disputed by Zhe Hornet, with 
the exhibit of “The Peri and the Pearl.” ‘The modest 
claim of Singletree, Darnley & Co. was lost in the din. 
Besides, that publishing firm did not own a magazine 
wherewith to make its claim less modest. 

The newspapers calculated Martin’s royalties. In 
some way the magnificent offers certain magazines had 
made him leaked out, and Oakland ministers called upon 
him in a friendly way, while professional begging letters 
began to clutter his mail. But worse than all this were 
the women. His photographs were published broadcast, 
and special writers exploited his strong, bronzed face, his 
scars, his heavy shoulders, his clear, quiet eyes, and the 
slight hollows in his cheeks like an ascetic’s. At this last 
he remembered his wild youth and smiled. Often, among 
the women he met, he would see now one, now another, 
looking at him, appraising him, selecting him. He laughed 
to himself. He remembered Brissenden’s warning and 
laughed again. The women would never destroy him, 
that much was certain. He had gone past that stage. 

Once, walking with Lizzie toward night school, she 
caught a glance directed toward him by a well-gowned, 
handsome woman of the bourgeoisie. ‘The glance was a 
trifle too long, a shade too considerative. Lizzie knew it 
for what it was, and her body tensed angrily. Martin 
noticed, noticed the cause of it, told her how used he was 
becoming to it and that he did not care anyway. 


388 MARTIN EDEN 


“ You ought to care,’ she answered with blazing eyes. 
“ You’re sick. That’s what’s the matter.” 

“Never healthier in my life. I weigh five pounds more 
than I ever did.” 

“Jt ain’t your body. It’s your head. Something’s 
wrong with your think-machine. Even I can see that, 
an’ I ain’t nobody.” 

He walked on beside her, reflecting. 

“Td give anything to see you get over it,” she broke 
out impulsively. ‘“ You ought to care when women look 
at you that way, a man like you. It’s not natural. It’s 
all right enough for sissy-boys. But you ain’t made that 
way. So help me, I’d be willing an’ glad if the right 
woman came along an’ made you care.” 

When he left Lizzie at night school, he returned to the 
Metropole. 

Once in his rooms, he dropped into a Morris chair and 
sat staring straight before him. He did not doze. Nor 
did he think. His mind was a blank, save for the inter- 
vals when unsummoned memory pictures took form and 
color and radiance just under his eyelids. He saw these 
pictures, but he was scarcely conscious of them — no more 
so than if they had been dreams. Yet he was not asleep. 
Once, he roused himself and glanced at his watch. It was 
just eight o’clock. He had nothing to do, and it was too 
early for bed. ‘Then his mind went blank again, and the 
pictures began to form and vanish under his eyelids. 
There was nothing distinctive about the pictures. They 
were always masses of leaves and shrub-like branches shot | 
through with hot sunshine. 

A knock at the door aroused him. He was not asleep, 
and his mind immediately connected the knock with a 
telegram, or letter, or perhaps one of the servants bring- 
ing back clean clothes from the laundry. He was think- 
ing about Joe and wondering where he was, as he said, 
“Come in.” 

He was still thinking about Joe, and did not turn tow- 
ard the door. He heard it close softly. There was a 
long silence. He forgot that there had been a knock at 
the door, and was still staring blankly before him when 


MARTIN EDEN 389 


he heard a woman’s sob. It was involuntary, spasmodic, 
checked, and stifled — he noted that as he turned about. 
The next instant he was on his feet. 

‘“ Ruth!” he said, amazed and bewildered. 

Her face was white and strained. She stood just inside 
the door, one hand against it for support, the other pressed 
to her side. She extended both hands toward him pite- 
ously, and started forward to meet him. As he caught 
her hands and led her to the Morris chair he noticed how 
cold they were. He drew up another chair and sat down 
on the broad arm of it. He was too confused to speak. In 
his own mind his affair with Ruth was closed and sealed. 
He felt much in the same way that he would have felt 
had the Shelly Hot Springs Laundry suddenly invaded 
the Hotel Metropole with a whole week’s washing ready 
for him to pitch into. Several times he was about to 
speak, and each time he hesitated. 

“No one knows I am here,” Ruth said in a faint voice, 
with an appealing smile. 

* What did you say?” he asked. 

He was surprised at the sound of his own voice. 

She repeated her words. 

“ Oh,” he said, then wondered what more he could pos- 
sibly say. 

“T saw you come in, and I waited a few minutes.” 

. “Qh,” he said again. . 

He had never been so tongue-tied in his life. Posi- 
tively he did not have an idea in his head. He felt stupid 
and awkward, but for the life of him he could think of 
nothing to say. It would have been easier had the in- 
trusion been the Shelly Hot Springs laundry. He could 
have rolled up his sleeves and gone to work. 

“¢ And then you came in,” he said finally. 

She nodded, witha slightly arch expression, and loosened 
the scarf at her throat. 

“‘T saw you first from across the street when you were 
with that girl.” 

“ Oh, yes,” he said simply. “I took her down to night 
school.” 


390 MARTIN EDEN 


“Well, aren’t you glad to see me?” she said at the end 
of another silence. 

“Yes, yes.” He spoke hastily. “ But wasn’t it rash of 
you to come here?” 

“T slipped in. Nobody knows Iam here. I wanted to 
see you. I came to tell you I have been very foolish. I 
came because I could no longer stay away, because my heart 
compelled me to come, because — because I wanted to come.” 

She came forward, out of her chair and over to him. 
She rested her hand on his shoulder a moment, breathing 
quickly, and then slipped into his arms. And in his large, 
easy way, desirous of not inflicting hurt, knowing that to 
repulse this proffer of herself was to inflict the most griev- 
ous hurt a woman could receive, he folded his arms around 
her and held her close. But there was no warmth in the 
embrace, no caressin the contact. She had come into his 
arms, and he held her, that was all. She nestled against 
him, and then, with a change of position, her hands crept 
up and rested upon his neck. But his flesh was not fire be- 
neath those hands, and he felt awkward and uncomfortable. 

“What makes you tremble so?” he asked. “Is it a 
chill? Shall I light the grate ?” 

He made a movement to disengage himself, but she clung 
more closely to him, shivering violently. 

“It is merely nervousness,” she said with chattering 
teeth. “I'll control myself in a minute. There, I am 
better already.” 

Slowly her shivering died away. He continued to 
hold her, but he was no longer puzzled. He knew now for 
what she had come. 

‘“My mother wanted me to marry Charley Hapgood,” 
she announced. 

“Charley Hapgood, that fellow who speaks always in 
platitudes?” Martin groaned. Then he added, “ And now, 
I suppose, your mother wants you to marry me.” 

He did not put it in the form of a question. . He stated 
it as a certitude, and before his eyes began to dance the 
rows of figures of his royalties. 

“She will not object, I know that much,” Ruth said. 

“She considers me quite eligible?” 


MARTIN EDEN 391 


Ruth nodded. 

« And yet Iam not a bit more eligible now than I was 
when she broke our engagement,” he meditated. “I 
haven’t changed any. I’m the same Martin Eden, though 
for that matter I’m a bit worse—I smoke now. Don’t 
you smell my breath ? ” 

In reply she pressed her open fingers against his lips, 
placed them graciously and playfully, and in expectancy 
of the kiss that of old had always been a consequence. 
But there was no caressing answer of Martin’s lips. He 
waited until the fingers were removed and then went on. 

“YT am not changed. I haven’t got a job. Vm not 
looking for a job. Furthermore, I am not going to look 
forajob. And [I still believe that Herbert Spencer is a 
great and noble man and that Judge Blount is an unmiti- 
gated ass. Ihad dinner with him the other night, so I 
ought to know.”’ 

“ But you didn’t accept father’s invitation,” she chided. 

“So you know about that? Who sent him? Your 
mother ?”’ 

She remained silent. 

“Then she did send him. I thought so. And now I 
suppose she has sent you.” 

“No one knows that I am here,” she protested. ‘Do 
you think my mother would permit this ?”’ 

' “ She’d permit you to marry me, that’s certain.” 

She gave a sharp cry. ‘Oh, Martin, don’t be cruel. 
You have not kissed me once. You are as unresponsive as 
a stone. And think what I have dared to do.” She 
looked about her with a shiver, though half the look was 
curiosity. “ Just think of where I am.” 

“Tcould die for you! LI could die for you!” — Lizzie’s 
words were ringing in his ears. 

“Why didn’t you dare it before?” he asked harshly. 
“ When I hadn’t a job? When I was starving? When 
I was just as I am now, as a man, as an artist, the same 
Martin Eden? That’s the question I’ve been propounding 
to myself for many a day —not concerning you merely, 
but concerning everybody. You see I have not changed, 


392 MARTIN EDEN 


though my sudden apparent appreciation in value compels 
me constantly to reassure myself on that point. Dve got 
the same flesh on my bones, the same ten fingers and toes. 
Iam the same. I have not developed any new strength 
nor virtue. My brain is the same old brain. I haven’t 
made even one new generalization on literature or phi- 
losophy. Iam personally of the same value that I was 
when nobody wanted me. And what is puzzling me is 
why they want me now. Surely they don’t want me for 
myself, for myself is the same old self they did not want. 
Then they must want me for something else, for something 
that is outside of me, for something that is not I! Shall 
I tell you what that something is? It is for the recognition 
I have received. That recognition isnot I. It resides in 
the minds of others. Then again for the money I have 
earned and am earning. But that money is not I. It re- 
sides in banks and in the pockets of Tom, Dick, and Harry. 
And is it for that, for the recognition and the money, that 
you now want me?” 

“You are breaking my heart,” she sobbed. ‘ You 
know I love you, that I am here because I love you.” 

“T am afraid you don’t see my point,” he said gently. 
“What I mean is: if you love me, how does it happen 
that you love me now so much more than you did when 
your love was weak enough to deny me?” _ 

“ Forget and forgive,” she cried passionately. “I loved 
you all the time, remember that, and I am here, now, in 
your arms.” 

“T’m afraid Iam a shrewd merchant, peering into the 
scales, trying to weigh your love and find out what man- 
ner of thing it is.” 

She withdrew herself from his arms, sat upright, and 
looked at him long and searchingly. She was about to 
speak, then faltered and changed her mind. 

“You see, it appears this way to me,” he went on. 
‘When I was all that Iam now, nobody out of my own 
class seemed to care for me. When my books were all 
written, no one who had read the manuscripts seemed to 
care for them. In point of fact, because of the stuff I had 


MARTIN EDEN 393 
written they seemed to care even less for me. In writing 
the stuff it seemed that I had committed acts that were, to 
say the least, derogatory. ‘Geta job,’ everybody said.” 

She made a movement of dissent. 

“ Yes, yes,” he said; “except in your case you told me 
to get a position. The homely word jod, like much that 
I have written, offends you. Itis brutal. But I assure 
you it was no less brutal to me when everybody I knew 
recommended it to me as they would recommend right 
conduct to an immoral creature. But to return. The 
publication of what I had written, and the public notice 
I received, wrought a change in the fibre of your love. 
Martin Eden, with his work all performed, you would not 
marry. Your love for him was not strong enough to 
enable you to marry him. But your love is now strong 
enough, and I cannot avoid the conclusion that its 
strength arises from the publication and the public notice. 
In your case I do not mention royalties, though I am 
certain that they apply to the change wrought in your 
mother and father. Of course, all this is not flattering 
to me. But worst of all, it makes me question love, 
. sacred love. Is love so gross a thing that it must feed 
upon publication and public notice? It would seem 
so. I have sat and thought upon it till my head went 
around.” 

-“ Poor, dear head.”’ She reached up a hand and passed 
the fingers soothingly through his hair. “Let it go 
around no more. Let us begin anew, now. I loved you 
all the time. I know that I was weak in yielding to my 
mother’s will. JI should not have done so. Yet I have 
heard you speak so often with broad charity of the falli- 
bility and frailty of humankind. Extend that charity to 
me. I acted mistakenly. Forgive me.” 

“Oh, I do forgive,” he said impatiently. “It is easy 
to forgive where there is really nothing to forgive. Noth- 
ing that you have done requires forgiveness. One acts 
according to one’s lights, and more than that one cannot 
do. As well might I ask you to forgive me for my not 
getting a job.” 


394 MARTIN EDEN 


“T meant well,” she protested. ‘“ You know that. I 
could not have loved you and not meant well.” 

“True; but you would have destroyed me out of your 
well-meaning. 

“Yes, yes,” he shut off her attempted objection. ‘ You 
would have destroyed my writing and my career. Real- 
ism is imperative to my nature, and the bourgeois spirit 
hates realism. The bourgeoisie is cowardly. It is afraid 
of life. And all your effort was to make me afraid of 
life. You would have formalized me. You would have 
compressed me into a two-by-four pigeonhole of life, 
where all life’s values are unreal, and false, and vulgar.” 
He felt her stir protestingly. “ Vulgarity —a hearty 
vulgarity, Pll admit —is the basis of bourgeois refine- 
ment and culture. As I say, you wanted to formalize 
me, to make me over into one of your own class, with 
your class-ideals, class-values, and class-prejudices.” He 
shook his head sadly. “And you do not understand, 
even now, what Iam saying. My words do not mean to 
you what I endeavor to make them mean. What I say 
is so much fantasy to you. Yet to me it is vital reality. 
At the best you are a trifle puzzled and amused that this 
raw boy, crawling up out of the mire of the abyss, should 
pass judgment upon your class and call it vulgar.” 

She leaned her head wearily against his shoulder, and 
her body shivered with recurrent nervousness. He waited 
for a time for her to speak, and then went on. 

‘“ And now you want to renew our love. You want us 
to be married. You wantme. And yet, listen—if my 
books had not been noticed, I’d nevertheless have been 
just what Tam now. And you would have stayed away. 
It is all those damned books —”’ 

“ Don’t swear,” she interrupted. 

Her reproof startled him. He broke into a harsh 
laugh. 

“That’s it,” he said, “at a high moment, when what 
seems your life’s happiness is at stake, you are afraid of 
Hane the same old way —afraid of life and a healthy 
oath.” 


MARTIN EDEN 395 

She was stung by his words into realization of the 
puerility of her act, and yet she felt that he had magni- 
fied it unduly and was consequently resentful. They sat 
in silence for a long time, she thinking desperately and 
he pondering upon his love which had departed. He 
knew, now, that he had not really loved her. It was an 
idealized Ruth he had loved, an ethereal creature of his 
own creating, the bright and luminous spirit of his love- 
poems. ‘The real bourgeois Ruth, with all the bourgeois 
failings and with the hopeless cramp of the bourgeois 
psychology in her mind, he had never loved. 

She suddenly began to speak. 

“T know that much you have said is so. I have been 
afraid of life. I did not love you well enough. I have 
learned to love better. I love you for what you are, for 
what you were, for the ways even by which you have 
become. I love you for the ways wherein you differ from 
what you call my class, for your beliefs which I do not 
understand but which I know I can come to understand. 
I shall devote myself to understanding them. And even 
your smoking and your swearing —they are part of you 
and I will love you for them, too. I can still learn. 
In the last ten minutes I have learned much. That I 
have dared to come here is a token of what I have already 
learned. Oh, Martin !—” 

’ She was sobbing and nestling close against him. 

For the first time his arms folded her gently and with 
sympathy, and she acknowledged it with a happy move- 
ment and a brightening face. 

“It is too late,” he said. He remembered Lizzie’s 
words. “I am a sick man—oh, not my body. It is 
my soul, my brain. I seem to have lost all values. I 
care for nothing. If you had been this way a few months | 
ago, it would have been different. It is too late, now.” 

“Tt is not too late,” she cried. “I will show you. I 
will prove to you that my love has grown, that it is 
greater to me than my class and all that is dearest to 
me. , All that is dearest to the bourgeoisie I will flout. 
I am no longer afraid of life. I will leave my father and 


396 MARTIN EDEN 


mother, and let my name become a by-word with my 
friends. I will come to you here and now, in free love 
if you will, and I will be proud and glad to be with you. 
If I have been a traitor to love, I will now, for love’s 
sake, be a traitor to all that made that earlier treason.” 

She stood before him, with shining eyes. 

“T am waiting, Martin,” she whispered, “waiting for 
you to accept me. Look at me.” 

It was splendid, he thought, looking at her. She had 
redeemed herself for all that she had lacked, rising up at 
last, true woman, superior to the iron rule of bourgeois 
convention. It was splendid, magnificent, desperate. And 
yet, what was the matter with him? He was not thrilled 
nor stirred by what she had done. It was splendid and 
magnificent only intellectually. In what should have been 
a moment of fire, he coldly appraised her. His heart 
was untouched. He was unaware of any desire for her. 
Again he remembered Lizzie’s words. 

“JT am sick, very sick,” he said with a despairing ges- 
ture. ‘How sick I did not know till now. Something 
has gone out of me. I have always been unafraid of life, 
but I never dreamed of being sated with life. Life has 
so filed me that I am empty of any desire for anything. 
If there were room, I should want you, now. You see 
how sick I am.” 

He leaned his head back and closed his eyes ; and like 
a child, crying, that forgets its grief in watching the sun- 
light percolate through the tear-dimmed films over the © 
pupils, so Martin forgot his sickness, the presence of 
Ruth, everything, in watching the masses of vegetation, 
shot through hotly with sunshine that took form and 
blazed against the background of his eyelids. It was 
not restful, that green foliage. The sunlight was too 
raw and glaring. It hurt him to look at it, and yet he 
looked, he knew not why. 

He was brought back to himself by the rattle of the 
door-knob. Ruth was at the door. 

“ How shall I get out?” she questioned tearfully. “I 
am afraid.” 


MARTIN EDEN 397 


a 


br 


“Oh, forgive me,” he cried, springing to his feet. 
“T’m not myself, you know. I forgot you were here.” 
He put his hand to his head. “You see, I’m not just 
right. Dll take you home. We can go out by the 
servants’ entrance. No one will see us. Pull down 
that veil and everything will be all right.” 

She clung to his arm through the dim- lighted passages 
and down the narrow stairs. 

“JT am safe now,” she said, when they emerged on the 
sidewalk, at the same time starting to take her hand 
from his arm. 

“No, no, I’ll see you home,” he answered. 

““No, please don’t,” she objected. ‘It is unnecessary.” 

Again she started to remove her hand. He felt a 
momentary curiosity. Now that she was out of danger 
she was afraid. She was in almost a panic to be quit of 
him. He could see no reason for it and attributed it to 
her nervousness. So he restrained her withdrawing hand 
and started to walk on with her. Halfway down the 
block, he saw a man in a long overcoat shrink back into 
a doorway. He shot a glance in as he passed by, and, 
despite the high turned-up collar, he was certain that he 


recognized Ruth’s brother, Norman. taitensananetoni 


During the walk Ruth and Martin held little conversa- 
tion. She was stunned. He was apathetic. Once, he 
mentioned that he was going away, back to the South Seas, 
and, once, she asked him to forgive her having come to 
him. And that was all. The parting at her door was 
conventional. They shook hands, said good night, and 
he lifted his hat. The door swung shut, and he lighted 
a cigarette and turned back for his hotel. When he came 


to the doorway into which he had seen Norman shrink, he / 


stopped and looked in in a speculative humor. 

“She lied,” he said aloud. “She made believe to me 
that she had dared greatly, and all the while she knew 
the brother that brought her was waiting to take her 
back.” He burst into laughter. ‘“ Oh, these bourgeois! 
When I was broke, I was not fit to be seen with his sister. 
When I have a bank account, he brings her to me.” 


' 
ie 


398 MARTIN EDEN 


As he swung on his heel to go on, a tramp, going in the 
same direction, begged him over his shoulder. 

“‘ Say, mister, can you give me a quarter to get a bed ?” 
were the words. 

But it was the voice that made Martin turn around. 
The next instant he had Joe by the hand. 

“D’ye remember that time we parted at the Hot 
Springs?” the other was saying. “I said then we’d meet 
again. I felt itin my bones. An’ here we are.” 

“You're looking good,” Martin said admiringly, “and 
you've put on weight.” 

“T sure have.” Joe’s face was beaming. “I never 
knew what it was to live till I hit hoboin’. I’m thirty 
pounds heavier an’ feel tiptop all the time. Why, I was 
worked to skin an’ bone in them old days. Hoboin’ sure 
agrees with me.” 

“But you’re looking for a bed just the same,” Martin 
chided, “and it’s a cold night.” 

“uh? Lookin’ for a bed?” Joe shot a hand into his 
hip pocket and brought it out filled with small change. 
“That beats hard graft,” he exulted. ‘“ You just looked 
good; that’s why I battered you.” 

Martin laughed and gave in. 

“You've several full-sized drunks right there,” he 
insinuated. 

Joe slid the money back into his pocket. 

“Not in mine,” he announced. “No gettin’ oryide for 
me, though there ain’t nothin’ to stop me except I don’t 
wantto. Ive ben drunk once since I seen you last, an’ then 
it was unexpected, bein’ on an empty stomach. When I 
work like a beast, I drink like a beast. When I live like 
a man, I drink like a man—a jolt now an’ again when I 
feel like it, an’ that’s all.” 

Martin arranged to meet him next day, and went on to 
the hotel. He paused in the office to look up steamer 
sailings. The Mariposa sailed for Tahiti in five days. 

“Telephone over to-morrow and reserve a stateroom 
for me,” he told the clerk. ‘No deck-stateroom, but 
down below, on the weather-side,— the port-side, re- 


MARTIN EDEN 399 
member that, the port-side. You'd better write it 
down.” | 

Once in his room he got into bed and slipped off to 
sleep as gently asachild. The occurrences of the evening 
had made no impression on him. His mind was dead to 
impressions. ‘The glow of warmth with which he met 
Joe had been most fleeting. The succeeding minute he 
had been bothered by the ex-laundryman’s presence and 
by the compulsion of conversation. That in five more 
days he sailed for his loved South Seas meant nothing to 
him. So he closed his eyes and slept normally and com- 
fortably for eight uninterrupted hours. He was not rest- 
less. He did not change his position, nor did he dream. 
Sleep had become to him oblivion, and each day that he 
awoke, he awoke with regret. Life worried and bored ° 
him, and time was a vexation. 


CHAPTER XLVI 


“Say, Joe,” was his greeting to his old-time working- 
mate next morning, “there’s a Frenchman out on 
Twenty-eighth Street. He’s made a pot of money, and 
he’s going back to France. It’s a dandy, well-appointed, 
small steam laundry. There’s astart for youif you want to 
settle down. Here, take this; buy some clothes with it and 
be at this man’s office by ten o’clock. He looked up the 
laundry for me, and he'll take you out and show you 
around. If you likeit, and think it is worth the price — 
twelve thousand — let me knowand it is yours. Nowrun 
along. I’m busy. Tllsee you later.” 

“Now look here, Mart,” the other said slowly, with 
kindling anger, “*I.come here this mornin’ to see you. 
Savve? Ididn’t come here to get no laundry. I come 
here for a talk for old friends’ sake, and you shove a laun- 
dry at me. I tell you what youcan do. You can take 
that laundry an’ go to hell.” 

He was starting to fling out of the room when Martin 
caught him by the shoulder and whirled him around. 

‘Now look here, Joe,” he said; “if youact that way, Pll 
punch your head. And for old friends’ sake I'll punch it 
hard. Savve? — you will, will you?” 

Joe had clinched and attempted to throw him, and he 
was twisting and writhing out of the advantage of the 
other’s hold. They reeled about the room, locked in each | 
other’s arms, and came down with a crash across the splin- 
tered wreckage of a wicker chair. Joe was underneath, 
with arms spread out and held and with Martin’s knee on 
his chest. He was panting and gasping for breath when 
Martin released him. 

‘“* Now we'll talk a moment,” Martin said. “ You can’t 

400 


MARTIN EDEN 401 
get fresh with me. I want that laundry business finished 
first of al. Then you can come back and we’ll talk for 
old sake’s sake. Itold youl was busy. Look at that.” 

A servant had just come in with the morning mail, a 
great mass of letters and magazines. 

“ How can I wade through that and talk with you? 
You go and fix up that laundry, and then we'll get to- 
gether.” 

“ All right,” Joe admitted reluctantly. “I thought you 
was turnin’ me down, but I guess I was mistaken. But 
you can’t lick me, Mart, in a stand-up fight. LDve got the 
reach on you.” 

*“ We'll put on the gloves sometime and see,” Martin . 
said with a smile. 

“Sure; as soon as I get that laundry going.” Joe ex- 
tended his arm. “ You see that reach? It'll make you go 
a few.” 

Martin heaved a sigh of relief when the door closed 
behind the laundryman. He was becoming anti-social. 
Daily he found it a severer strain to be decent with people. 
Their presence perturbed him, and the effort of conversation” 
irritated him. ‘They made him restless, and no sooner was 
he in contact with them than he was casting about for ex- 
cuses to get rid of them. 

He did not proceed to attack his mail, and for a half 
hour he lolled in his chair, doing nothing, while no more 
than vague, half-formed thoughts occasionally filtered 
through his intelligence, or rather, at wide intervals, them- 
selves constituted the flickering of his intelligence. 

He roused himself and began glancing through his mail. 
There were adozen requests for autographs—he knew them 
at sight; there were professional begging letters; and there 
were letters from cranks, ranging from the man with a 
working model of perpetual motion, and the man who 
demonstrated that the surface of the earth was the inside 
of a hollow sphere, to the man seeking financial aid to pur- 
chase the Peninsula of Lower California for the purpose of 
communist colonization. There were letters from women 
seeking to know him, and over one such he smiled, for en- 


2D 


402 MARTIN EDEN 


closed was her receipt for pew-rent, sent as evidence of her 
good faith and as proof of her respectability. 

Editors and publishers contributed to the daily heap of 
letters, the former on their knees for his manuscripts, the 
latter on their knees for his books — his poor disdained 
manuscripts that had kept all he possessed in pawn for 
so many dreary months in order to find them in postage. 
There were unexpected checks for English serial rights 
and for advance payments on foreign translations. His 
English agent announced the sale of German translation 
rights in three of his books, and informed him that Swed- 
ish editions, from which he could expect nothing because 
Sweden was not a party to the Berne Convention, were 
already on the market. ‘Then there was a nominal request 
for his permission for a Russian translation, that country 
being likewise outside the Berne Convention. 

He turned to the huge bundle of clippings which had 
come in from his press bureau, and read about himself and 
his vogue, which had become a furore. All his creative 
output had been flung to the public in one magnificent 
sweep. That seemed to account for it. He had taken 
the public off its feet, the way Kipling had, that time when 
he lay near to death and all the mob, animated by a mob- 
mind thought, began suddenly to read him. Martin re- 
membered how that same world-mob, having read him and 
acclaimed him and not understood him in the least, had, 
abruptly, a few months later, flung itself upon him and 
torn him to pieces. Martin grinned at the thought. Who 
was he that he should not be similarly treated in a few 
more months? Well, he would fool the mob. He would 
be away, in the South Seas, building his grass house, trad- 
ing for pearls and copra, jumping reefs in frail outriggers, 
catching sharks and bonitas, hunting wild goats among 
the cliffs of the valley that lay next to the valley of 
Taiohe. 

In the moment of that thought the desperateness of his 
situation dawned upon him. He saw, cleared eyed, that 
he was in the Valley of the Shadow. All the life that 
was in him was fading, fainting, making toward death. 


MARTIN EDEN 403 
He realized how much he slept, and how much he desired 
tosleep. Of old, he had hated sleep. It had robbed him of 
precious moments of living. Four hours of sleep in the 
twenty-four had meant being robbed of four hours of life. 
How he had grudged sleep! Now it was life he grudged. 
Life was not good; its taste in his mouth was without 
tang, and bitter. This was his peril. Life that did not 
yearn toward life was in fair way toward ceasing. Some 
remote instinct for preservation stirred in him, and he | 
knew he must getaway. He glanced about the room, and | 
the thought of packing was burdensome. Perhaps it 
would be better to leave that to the last. In the mean- | 
time he might be getting an outfit. | 
He put on his hat and went out, stopping in at a gun- | 
store, where he spent the remainder of the morning buy- 
ing automatic rifles, ammunition, and fishing tackle. 
Fashions changed in trading, and he knew he would have 
to wait till he reached Tahiti before ordering his trade- 
goods. They could come up from Australia, anyway. 
This solution was a source of pleasure. He had avoided 
doing something, and the doing of anything just now was 
unpleasant. He went back to the hotel gladly, with a 
feeling of satisfaction in that the comfortable Morris chair 
was waiting for him ; and he groaned inwardly, on enter- 
ing his room, at sight of Joe in the Morris chair. 

’ Joe was delighted with the laundry. Everything was 
settled, and he would enter into possession next day. 
Martin lay on the bed, with closed eyes, while the other 
talked on. Martin’s thoughts were far away —so far 
away that he was rarely aware that he was thinking. It 
was only by an effort that he occasionally responded. 
And yet this was Joe, whom he had always liked. But 
Joe was too keen with life. The boisterous impact of it 
on Martin’s jaded mind wasahurt. It wasanaching probe 
to his tired sensitiveness. When Joe reminded him that 
sometime in the future they were going to put on the 
gloves together, he could almost have screamed. 

“ Remember, Joe, you’re to run the laundry according 
to those old rules you used to lay down at Shelly Hot 


404 MARTIN EDEN 


Springs,” he said. ‘No overworking. No working at 
night. And no children at the mangles. No children 
anywhere. And a fair wage.” 

Joe nodded and pulled out a note-book. 

“Look at here. I was workin’ out them rules before 
breakfast this A.M. What d’ye think of them?” 

He read them aloud, and Martin approved, worrying at 
the same time as to when Joe would take himself off. 

It was late afternoon when he awoke. Slowly the fact 
of life came back to him. He glanced about the room. 
Joe had evidently stolen away after he had dozed off. 
That was considerate of Joe, he thought. Then he closed 
his eyes and slept again. 

In the days that followed Joe was too busy organizing 
and taking hold of the laundry to bother him much; and 
it was not until the day before sailing that the news- 
papers made the announcement that he had taken passage 
on the Mariposa. Once, when the instinct of preserva- 
tion fluttered, he went to a doctor and underwent a 
searching physical examination. Nothing could be found 
the matter with him. His heart and lungs were pro- 
nounced magnificent. Every organ, so far as the doctor 
could know, was normal and was working normally. 

“There is nothing the matter with you, Mr. Eden,” he 
said, ‘“ positively nothing the matter with you. You are 
in the pink of condition. Candidly, I envy you your 
health. -It is superb. Look at that chest. There, and 
in your stomach, lies the secret of your remarkable con- ~ 
stitution. Physically, you are a man in a thousand — in 
ten thousand. Barring accidents, you should live to be a 
hundred.” 

And Martin knew that Lizzie’s diagnosis had been cor- 
rect. Physically he was all right. It was his “think- 
machine ” that had gone wrong, and there was no cure for 
that except to get away to the South Seas. The trouble 
was that now, on the verge of departure, he had no desire 
to go. The South Seas charmed him no more than did 
bourgeois civilization. ‘There was no zest in the thought 
of departure, while the act of departure appalled him 


MARTIN EDEN 405 
as a weariness of the flesh. He would have felt better 
if he were already on board and gone. 

The last day was a sore trial. Having read of his sail- 
ing in the morning papers, Bernard Higginbotham, Ger- 
trude, and all the family came to say good-by, as did 
Hermann von Schmidt and Marian. Then there was 
business to be transacted, bills to be paid, and everlasting 
reporters to be endured. He said good-by to Lizzie 
Connolly, abruptly, at the entrance to night school, and 
hurried away. At the hotel he found Joe, too busy all 
day with the laundry to have come to him earlier. It 
was the last straw, but Martin gripped the arms of his 
chair and talked and listened for half an hour. 

*“ You know, Joe,” he said, “ that you are not tied down 
to that laundry. There are no strings on it. You can 
sell it any time and blow the money. Any time you get 
sick of it and want to hit the road, just pull out. Do 
what will make you the happiest.” 

Joe shook his head. 

‘*No more road in mine, thank you kindly. Hoboin’s 
all right, exceptin’ for one thing—the girls. I can’t 
help it, but ’m a ladies’ man. I can’t get along without 
"em, and you’ve got to get along without ’em when you're 
hoboin’. Thetimes I’ve passed by houses where dances 
an’ parties was goin’ on, an’ heard the women laugh, an’ saw 
their white dresses and smiling faces through the windows 
—Gee! I tell you them moments was plain hell. I like 
dancin’ an’ picnics, an’ walking in the moonlight, an’ all 
the rest too well. Me for the laundry, and a good front, 
with big iron dollars clinkin’ in my jeans. I seen a girl 
already, just yesterday, and, d’ye know, I’m feelin’ already 
I'd just as soon marry her as not. [ve ben whistlin’ all 
day at the thought of it. She’s a beaut, with the kindest 
eyes and softest voice you ever heard. Me for her, you can 
stack on that. Say, why don’t you get married with all this 
money toburn? You could get the finest girl inthe land.” 

Martin shook his head with a smile, but in his secret 
heart he was wondering why any man wanted to marry. 
It seemed an amazing and incomprehensible thing. 


Sere eevee 


406 MARTIN EDEN 


From the deck of the Mariposa, at the sailing hour, 
he saw Lizzie Connolly hiding on the skirts of the crowd 
on the wharf. Take her with you, came the thought. It 
is easy to be kind. She will be supremely happy. It 
was almost a temptation one moment, and the succeeding 
moment it became a terror. He was in a panic at the 
thought of it. His tired soul cried out in protest. He 
turned away from the rail with a groan, muttering, “ Man, 
you are too sick, you are too sick.” 

He fled to his stateroom, where he lurked until the 
steamer was clear of the dock. In the dining saloon, at 
luncheon, he found himself in the place of honor, at the 
captain’s right; and he was not long in discovering that 
he was the great man on board. But no more unsatis- 
factory great man ever sailed on a ship. He spent the 
afternoon in a deck-chair, with closed eyes, dozing 
brokenly most of the time, and in the evening went early 
to bed. 

After the second day, recovered from seasickness, the 
full passenger list was in evidence, and the more he saw 
of the passengers the more he disliked them. Yet he 
knew that he did them injustice. They were good and 
kindly people, he forced himself to acknowledge, and in 
the moment of acknowledgment he qualified —good and 
kindly like all the bourgeoisie, with all the psychological 
cramp and intellectual futility of their kind. ‘They bored 
him when they talked with him, their little superficial 
minds were so filled with emptiness ; while the boisterous 
high spirits and the excessive energy of the younger people 
shocked him. They were never quiet, ceaselessly playing 
deck-quoits, tossing rings, promenading, or rushing to the 
rail with loud cries to watch the leaping porpoises and the 


iy first.schools of flying fish. 


He slept much. After breakfast he sought his deck- 
chair with a magazine he never finished. The printed 
pages tired him. He puzzled that men found so much 
to write about, and, puzzling, dozed in his chair. When 
the gong awoke him for luncheon, he was irritated that he 
must awaken. There was no satisfaction in being awake. 


MARTIN EDEN 407 

Once, he tried to arouse himself from his lethargy, and 
went forward into the forecastle with the sailors. But 
the breed of sailors seemed to have changed since the 
days he had lived in the forecastle. He could find no 
kinship with these stolid-faced, ox-minded bestial crea- 
tures. He was in despair. Up above nobody had wanted 
Martin Eden for his own sake, and he could not go back 
to those of his own class who had wanted him in the past. \ / 
He did not want them. He could not stand them any ~ 
more than he could stand the stupid first-cabin passengers 
and the riotous young people. 

Life was to him like strong, white light that hurts the 
tired eyes of a sick person. During every conscious 
moment life blazed in a raw glare around him and upon 
him. It hurt. It hurt intolerably. It was the first 
time in his life that Martin had travelled first class. 
On ships at sea he had always been in the forecastle, the 
steerage, or in the black depths of the coal-hold, passing 
coal. In those days, climbing up the iron ladders from 
out the pit of stifling heat, he had often caught glimpses 
of the passengers, in cool white, doing nothing but en- 
joy themselves, under awnings spread to keep the sun 
and wind away from them, with subservient stewards 
taking care of their every want and whim, and it had 
seemed to him that the realm in which they moved and 
had their being was nothing else than paradise. . Well, 
here he was, the great man on board, in the ibn: 
centre of it, sitting at the captain’s right hand, and yet 
vainly harking back to forecastle and stoke-hole in quest 
of the Paradise he had lost. -He had found no new one, 
_and now he could not find the old one. 

He strove to stir himself and find something to interest 
him. He ventured the petty officers’ mess, and was glad 
to getaway. He talked with a quartermaster off duty, an 
intelligent man who promptly prodded him with the 
socialist propaganda and forced into his hands a bunch of 
leaflets and pamphlets. He listened to the man expound- 
ing the slave-morality, and as he listened, he thought lan- 
guidly of his own Nietzsche philosophy. But what was 


408 MARTIN EDEN 


it worth, after all? He remembered one of Nietzsche’s 
mad utterances wherein that madman had doubted truth. 
And who was to say? Perhaps Nietzsche had been right. 
Perhaps there was no truth in anything, no truth in truth 
—no such thing as truth. But his mind wearied quickly, 
and he was content to go back to his chair and doze. 

Miserable as he was on the steamer, a new misery came 
upon him. What when the steamer reached Tahiti? He 
would have to go ashore. He would have to order his 
trade-goods, to find a passage on a schooner to the Mar- 
quesas, to do a thousand and one things that were awful 
to contemplate. Whenever hesteeled himself deliberately 
to think, he could see the desperate peril in which he 
stood. In all truth, he was in the Valley of the Shadow, 
and his danger lay in that he was not afraid. If he were 
only afraid, he would make toward life. Being unafraid, 
he was drifting deeper into the shadow. He found no 
delight in the old familiar things of life. The Mariposa 
was now in the northeast trades, and this wine of wind, 
surging against him, irritated him. He had his chair 
moved to escape the embrace of this lusty comrade of old 
days and nights. 

The day the Mariposa entered the doldrums, Martin 
was more miserable than ever. He could no longer sleep. 
He was soaked with sleep, and perforce he must now stay 
awake and endure the white glare of life. He moved 
about restlessly. The air was sticky and humid, and the 


rain-squalls were unrefreshing. He ached with hfe. He 


walked around the deck until that hurt too much, then 
sat in his chair until he was compelled to walk again. He 
forced himself at last to finish the magazine, and from the 
steamer library he culled several volumes of poetry. But 
they could not hold him, and once more he took to 
walking. 

He stayed late on deck, after dinner, but that did not 
help him, for when he went below, he could not sleep. 
This surcease from life had failed him. It was too much. 
He turned on the electric light and tried to read. One of 
the volumes was a Swinburne. He lay in bed, glancing 


——— I oe 


MARTIN EDEN 409 


ay 


through its pages, until suddenly he became aware that he 
was reading with interest. He finished the stanza, at- 
tempted to read on, then came back toit. He rested the 
book face downward on his breast and fell to thinking. 
That was it. The very thing. Strange that it had never 
come to him before. That was the meaning of it all; he 
had been drifting that way all the time, and now Swin- 
burne showed him that it was the happy way out. He 
wanted rest, and here was rest awaiting him. He glanced 
at the open port-hole. Yes, it was large enough. For the 
first time in weeks he felt happy. At last he had dis- 
covered the cure of his ill. He picked up the book and 
read the stanza slowly aloud :— 


«<¢ From too much love of living, 

From hope and fear set free, 

We thank with brief thanksgiving 
Whatever gods may be 

That no life lives forever ; 

That dead men rise up never ; 
That even the weariest river 
Winds somewhere safe to sea. 


9399 


He looked again at the open port. Swinburne had fur- 
nished the key. Life was ill, or, rather, it had become ill 
—an unbearable thing. “ That dead men rise up never !” 


That line stirred him with a profound feeling of gratitude. 


It was the one beneficent thing in the universe. When ¥ 
life became an aching weariness, death was ready to soothe 
away to everlasting sleep. But what was he waiting for ? 
It was time to go. 

He arose and thrust his head out the port-hole, looking 
down into the milky wash. The Mariposa was deeply 
loaded, and, hanging by his hands, his feet would be in 
the water. He could slip in noiselessly. No one would 
hear. A smother of spray dashed up, wetting his face. It 
tasted salt on his lips, and the taste was good. He won- 
dered if he ought to write a swan-song, but laughed the 
thought away. ‘There was no time. He was too impa- 
tient, to be gone. 

Turning off the light in his room so that it might not 


410 MARTIN EDEN 


betray him, he went out the port-hole feet first. His 
shoulders stuck, and he forced himself back so as to try it 
with one arm down by his side. A roll of the steamer 
aided him, and he was through, hanging by his hands. 
When his feet touched the sea, he let go. He was in a 
milky froth of water. The side of the Mariposa rushed 
past him like a dark wall, broken here and there by lighted 
ports. She was certainly making time. Almost before he 
knew it, he was astern, swimming gently on the foam- 
crackling surface. 

A bonita struck at his white body, and he laughed 
aloud. It had taken a piece out, and the sting of it 
reminded him of why he was there. In the work to do 
he had forgotten the purpose of it. The lights of the 
Mariposa were growing dim in the distance, and there 
he was, swimming confidently, as though it were his ir- 
tention to make for the nearest land a thousand miles or 
SO away. 

It was the automatic instinct to live. He ceased swim- 
ming, but the moment he felt the water rising above his 
mouth the hands struck out sharply with a lifting move- 
ment. ‘The will to live, was his thought, and the thought 
was accompanied by a sneer. Well, he had will, —ay, 
will strong enough that with one last exertion it could 
destroy itself and cease to be. 

He changed his position to a vertical one. He glanced 
up at the quiet stars, at the same time emptying his lungs 
of air. With swift, vigorous propulsion of hands and feet, 
he lifted his shoulders and half his chest out of water. 
This was to gain impetus for the descent. Then he let 
himself go and sank without movement, a white statue, 
into the sea. He breathed in the water deeply, deliber- 
ately, after the manner of a man taking an anesthetic. 
When he strangled, quite involuntarily his arms and legs 
clawed the water and drove him up to the surface and 
into the clear sight of the stars. 

The will to live, he thought disdainfully, vainly en- 
deavoring not to breathe the air into his bursting lungs. 
Well, he would have to try a new way. He filled his 


MARTIN EDEN i 411 


lungs with air, filled them full. This supply would take 
him far down. He turned over and went down head 
first, swimming with all his strength and all his will. 
Deeper and deeper he went. His eyes were open, and 
he watched the ghostly, phosphorescent trails of the dart- 
ing bonita. As he swam, he hoped that they would not 
strike at him, for it might snap the tension of his will. 
But they did not strike, and he found time to be grateful 
for this last kindness of life. 

Down, down, he swam till his arms and legs grew tired 
and hardly moved. He knew that he was deep. The 
pressure on his ear-drums was a pain, and there was a 
buzzing in his head. His endurance was faltering, but 
he compelled his arms and legs to drive him deeper until 
his will snapped and the air drove from his lungs in a 
great explosive rush. The bubbles rubbed and bounded 
like tiny balloons against his cheeks and eyes as they took 
their upward flight. Then came pain and strangulation. 
This hurt was not death, was the thought that oscillated 
through his reeling consciousness. Death did not hurt. 
It was life, the pangs of life, this awful, suffocating feel- 
ing; it was the last blow life could deal him. 

His wilful hands and feet began to beat and churn 
about, spasmodically and feebly. But he had fooled them 
and, the will to live that made them beat and churn. He 
was too deep down. They could never bring him to the 
surface. He seemed floating languidly in a sea of dreamy 
vision. Colors and radiances surrounded him and bathed 
him and pervaded him. What was that? It seemed a 
lighthouse; but it was inside his brain —a flashing, bright 
white light. It flashed swifter and swifter. There was a 
long rumble of sound, and it seemed to him that he was 
falling down a vast and interminable stairway. And some- 
where at the bottom he fell into darkness. That much he 
knew. He had fallen into darkness. And at the instant 
he knew, he ceased to know. 





Jack London’s Novels 


The Sea-Wolf 


“Jack London’s ‘The Sea-Wolf’ is marvellously truthful. ... 
Reading it through at a sitting, we have found it poignantly inter 
esting . . . a superb piece of craftsmanship.” 

— The New York Tribune. 


“«The Sea-Wolf,’ Jack London’s latest novel of adventure, is one 
that every reader with good red blood in his veins will hail with 
delight. There is no fumbling of the trigger here, no nervous and 
uncertain sighting along the barrel, but the quick, decisive aim and 
the bull’s-eye every time.” — Mazl and Express, New York. 


“Exciting, original, fascinating. ... Novel and pleasing.... 
So original, vivid, and daring that it commands attention.” 
— Record-Herald, Chicago. 


Illustrated in colors by W. J. AYLWARD 


The Game, A Ltanscript from Real Life 


“It is told with such a glow of imaginative illusion, with such 
intense dramatic vigor, with such effective audacity of phrase, that 
it almost seems as if the author’s appeal was to the bodily eye as 
much as to the inner mentality, and that the events are actually 
happening before the reader.” — Zhe New York Herald, 


Illustrated in color by HENRY HUTT 


| The Iron Heel 


“‘ Power is certainly the keynote of this book. Every word tingles 
with it; it is so strong that it is almost brutal. But it is a great 
book, one that deserves to be read and pondered. ... The lift of 
the book sweeps the reader to his feet; it contains a mighty lesson 
and a most impressive warning.” — Indianapolis News, 


Cloth 12mo $1.50 


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JACK LONDON’S SOCIAL STUDIES 


People of the Abyss 


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soothingly by Prof. Walter A. Wyckoff, luridly by Mr. Stead, scientifi- 
cally by Mr. Charles Booth. But Mr. London alone has made it real 
and present to us.” — Zhe Independent. 


Lllustrated from Photographs 
Cloth, $1.50 net 


The War of the Gineces 


‘Mr. London’s book is thoroughly interesting, and Mr. London’s 
point of view is, as may be surmised, very different from that of the 
closet theorist.” — Spring field Republican, 


“‘The statements of this book are as bare and bold as the story of 
the ‘Sea-Wolf’ and present the socialists’ and laborers’ side of the 
economic situation with vigor, clearness, and impressiveness.” — 7he 
Watchman, 

Cloth, r2mo, $1.50 net 


The Road 
(My Life in the Underworld) 


As a literal record of life among tramps, of travel from end to end 
of the country by the exercise of wits, living the life and bearing the 
penalties of being a vagrant, its significance is great. 


Cloth, illustrated, $2.00 net 


By JACK LONDON and ANNA STRUNSKY 


The Kempton-Wace Letters 


“ , . . They are not exactly love letters, but letters about the nature 
of love, and what part romantic love plays and what part it ought 
to play in our modern life.” — Portland Advertiser. 


Cloth, r2mo, $ 1.50 


JACK LONDON’S SHORT STORIES 


Children of the Frost 


“Told with something of that same vigorous and honest manliness 
and indifference with which Mr. Kipling makes unbegging yet direct 
and unfailing appeal to the sympathy of his reader.” — Richmond 
Dispatch. 


Illustrations by Raphael M. Reay. Cloth, r2mo, $1.50 


The Faith of Men 


“Mr. London’s art as a story-teller nowhere manifests itself more 
strongly than in the swift, dramatic close of his stories. There is no 
hesitancy or uncertainty of touch. From the start the story moves 
straight to the inevitable conclusion.” — Courter Journal. 


Cloth, 12mo, $1.50 


Moon Face 


“Each of the stories is unique in its individual way, weird and un- 
canny, and told in Mr. London’s vigorous, compelling style.” 
— Interior. 

Illustrated, cloth, r2mo, $1.50 


Tales of the Fish Patrol 


“That they are vividly told hardly need be said, for Jack London is 
a realist as well as a writer of thrilling romances.” — Cleveland Plain 
Dealer. 

Illustrations by George Varian. Cloth, 12mo, $1.50 


Love of Life 


‘Jack London is at his best with the short story . . . clear-cut, sharp, 
incisive, with the tang of the frost in it.””— Record-Herald, Chicago. 


Cloth, 12mo, $1.50 


Jack London’s Novels 


White Fang 


‘‘The book might have been named ‘The Call of Control’ as dis- 
tinct from ‘The Call of the Wild.’ It is the same Alaskan life 
approached from another angle. The book is in no sense a sequel 
to the other, but a new, longer, more adventurous, dramatic, and 
entrancing story.” — Daily News. 


“Mr. London's vigorous, incisive style, unconventionality, and 
sympathetic understanding of Nature and of her children in the 
rough, never combined to better advantage than in ‘White Fang’ 
— by far the best thing that has come from his pen since ‘The Call 
of the Wild,’ and in some points an even better dog story... . 
‘White Fang’ is a splendid story, but it is more than a story — it is 
a wonderful study in animal nature and development.” 
— New York Times’ Saturday Review. 


“A thrilling story of adventure ... stirring indeed ... and it 
touches a chord of tenderness that is all too rare in Mr. London's 
work.” — Record-Herald, Chicago. 


Lilustrated in colors by CHARLES LIVINGSTON BULL 


The Call of the Wild 


“‘A big story in sober English, and with thorough art in the con- 
struction; a wonderfully perfect bit of work; a book that will be 
heard of long. ‘The dog’s adventures are as exciting as any man’s 
exploits could be, and Mr. London’s workmanship is wholly satis- 
fying.” — The New York Sun. 


“Even the most listless reader will be stirred by the virile force 
of the story, the strong, sweeping strokes with which the pictures 
of the northern wilds and the life therein are painted by the nar- 
rator, and the insight given into the soul of the primitive in nature. 
. . . More than that, it is one of the very best stories of the year, 
and one that will not be forgotten.’ — The Plain Dealer, Cleveland. 


Illustrated in colors by Puitiep R. GOODWIN azd CHARLES 
LIVINGSTON BULL; decorated by CHARLES EDWARD HOOPER 


Each, in cloth, 12mo, $1.50 





THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS, 64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 


Mr. F. MARION CRAWFORD’S NOVELS 
THE SARACINESCA SERIES 
In the binding of the Uniform Edition, each, $1.50 


Saracinesca 


“The work has two distinct merits, either of which would serve to make it 
great,—that of telling a perfect story in a perfect way, and of giving a 
graphic picture of Roman society in the last days of the Pope’s temporal 
power. ... The story is exquisitely told.” — Bostox Traveler. 


Sant’ Ilario. A Sequel to <¢ Saracinesca’’ 


“ A singularly powerful and beautiful story. ... It fulfils every requirement 
of artistic fiction. It brings out what is most impressive in human action, 
without owing any of its effectiveness to sensationalism or artifice. It is 
natural, fluent in evolution, accordant with experience, graphic in descrip- 
tion, penetrating in analysis, and absorbing in interest.”— New York 
Tribune. 


Don Orsino. A Sequel to «< Sant’ Ilario”’ 


“Perhaps the cleverest novel of the year.... There is not a dull para- 
graph in the book, and the reader may be assured that once begun, the 


story of Dox Orsino will fascinate him until its close.” — Zhe Crétic. 
Taquisara 

“To Mr. Crawford’s Roman novels belongs the supreme quality of uniting 

subtly drawn characters to a plot of uncommon interest.” — Chicago Tribune. 
Corleone 


“Mr, Crawford is the novelist born . . . a natural story-teller, with wit, 
imagination, and insight added to a varied and profound knowledge of 
social life.” — The Jnter-Ocean, Chicago. 


Casa Braccio. In two volumes, $2.00. Llustrated by A. 
Castaigne. 


Like Tagutsara and Corleone, it is closely related in plot to the fortunes of 
the Saracinesca family. 


“Mr. Crawford's books have life, pathos, and insight; he teils a dramatic 
story with many exquisite touches.” — Wew York Sun, 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS, 64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 


Mr. F. MARION CRAWFORD’S NOVELS 
NOVELS OF ROMAN SOCIAL LIFE 
In decorated cloth covers, each, $1.50 


A Roman Singer 


“One of the earliest and best works of this famous novelist... .. None 
but a genuine artist could have made so true a picture of human life, crossed 
by human passions and interwoven with human weakness. It is a perfect 
specimen of literary art." — Zhe Newark Advertiser, 


Marzio’s Crucifix 


“ We have repeatedly had occasion to say that Mr. Crawford possesses in 
an extraordinary degree the art of constructing a story. It is as ifit could 
not have been written otherwise, so naturally does the story unfold itself, 
and so logical and consistent is the sequence of incident after incident. As 
a story, Marzio’s Crucifix is perfectly constructed.” — Mew York Commer- 
cial Advertiser, 


Heart of Rome. A Tale of the Lost Water 


“Mr. Crawford has written a story of absorbing interest, a story with a 
genuine thrill in it ; he has drawn his characters with a sure and brilliant 
touch, and he has said many things surpassingly well.” — Mew York Times 
Saturday Review. 


Cecilia. A Story of Modern Rome 


“That F. Marion Crawford is a master of mystery needs no new telling.... 
His latest novel, Cecilia, is as weird as anything he has done since the 
memorable Mr. /saacs.... <A strong, interesting, dramatic story, with 
the picturesque Roman setting beautifully handled as only a master’s touch 
could do it.” — Philadelphia Evening Telegraph. 


Whosoever Shall Offend 


“It is a story sustained from beginning to end by an ever increasing dra- 
matic quality.” — Mew York Evening Post, 


Pietro Ghisleri 


“The imaginative richness, the marvellous ingenuity of plot, the power and 
subtlety of the portrayal of character, the charm of the romantic environ- 
ment, — the entire atmosphere, indeed, —rank this novel at once among 
the great creations.” — Zhe Boston Budget. 


To Leeward 


“The four characters with whose fortunes this novel deals are, perhaps, 
the most brilliantly executed portraits in the whole of Mr. Crawford's long 
picture gallery, while for subtle insight into the springs of human passion 
and for swift dramatic action none of the novels surpasses this one,” — 7ke 
News and Courier. 


A Lady of Rome 





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PUBLISHERS, 64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 


Mr. F. MARION CRAWFORD’S NOVELS 


Mr. Crawford has no equal as a writer of brilliant cosmopolitan fiction, in 
which the characters really belong to the chosen scene and the story inter- 
est is strong. His novels possess atmosphere in a high degree, 


Mr. Isaacs (India) 


Its scenes are laid in Simla, chiefly. This is the work which first placed 
its author among the most brilliant novelists of his day. 


Greifenstein (The Black Forest) 


“... Another notable contribution to the literature of the day. It pos- 
sesses Originality in its conception and is a work of unusual ability. Its 
interest is sustained to the close, and it is an advance even on the previous 
work of this talented author. Like all Mr. Crawford’s work, this novel is 
crisp, clear, and vigorous, and will be read with a great deal of interest.”— 
New York Evening Telegram. 


Zoroaster (Persia) 


“It is a drama in the force of its situations and in the poetry and dignity of 
its language; but its men and women are not men and women of a play. 
By the naturalness of their conversation and behavior they seem to live and 
lay hold of our human sympathy more than the same characters on a stage 
could possibly do.” — Zhe New York Times. 


The Witch of Prague (Bohemia) 


“ A fantastic tale,” illustrated by W. J. Hennessy. 


“‘ The artistic skill with which this extraordinary story is constructed and 
carried out is admirable and delightful.... Mr. Crawford has scored a 
decided triumph, for the interest of the tale is sustained throughout. ... 
A very remarkable, powerful, and interesting story.” — New York Tribune. 


Paul Patoff (Constantinople) 


“Mr. Crawford has a marked talent for assimilating local color, not to 
make mention of a broader historical sense. Even though he may adopt, 
as itis the romancer’s right to do, the extreme romantic view of history, it is 
always a living and moving picture that he evolves for us, varied and stir- 
ring.’ — New York Evening Post, 


Marietta ' (Venice) 


“ No living writer can surpass Mr. Crawford in the construction of a com- 
plicated plot and the skilful unravelling of the tangled skein.” — Chicago 
Record-Herald. 


“ He has gone back to the field of his earlier triumphs, and has, perhaps, 
scored the greatest triumph of them all.” —- New York Herald, 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS, 64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 


Mr. F. MARION CRAWFORD’S 


LATER NOVELS—’THE SINGER TRILOGY 


Three novels, each an independent, interesting episode from 
the life of Margaret Donne, the fascinating English girl who 
later became the most famous lyric soprano of her day. 


Each, illustrated, $1.50 
Fair Margaret 


tells of its heroine’s student days, of the conflicting claims of lovers anda 
career; of a retired opera singer in Paris whose portrait alone makes the 
book one to be treasured by those who know; and, in brief, of a girl’s first 
glimpse of the great unknown world beyond the footlights. 


The Primadonna 


“ Mr. Crawford is at his best in this romance. He tells an absorbing story, 
and he places at the centre of it a woman whose character is full of interest. 
... It is a dramatic beginning, and Mr. Crawford goes on as he begins 
. . . the whole tangled business becomes more and more exciting and we 
follow the Primadonna through the proceedings with breathless interest.” 
— New York Tribune, 


The Diva’s Ruby 


“F. Marion Crawford is one of the few writers who have mastered the art 
of writing sequels that are as vital and as absorbing as the original novels 
- . . sequels wherein the finding of a character mentioned in an earlier 
story gives us the full delight of meeting an old friend. ... This delicate 
paradoxical evolution ... is art, clean, deft, easy, dexterous art. There 
are not half a dozen men in literature to-day who could do these things 
consistently.” — Mew York Times Review. 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS, 64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 





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